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Copyright N° 



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HOME UNIVERSITY LIBRARY 
OF MODERN KNOWLEDGE 

No. 30 

Editors : 

HERBERT FISHER, M.A., F.B.A. 
Prof. GILBERT MURRAY, Litt.D., 

LL.D., F.B.A. 
Prof. J. ARTHUR THOMSON, M.A. 
Prof. WILLIAM T. BREWSTER, M.A. 



THE HOME mnVEKSITY LIBEAEY 
OF MODEEN KNOWLEDGE 

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HISTORY AND GEOGRAPHY 

Already Published 

THE DAWN OF HISTORY . . . By J. L. Myres 

ROME By W. Warde Fowler 

THE PAPACY AND MODERN 

TIMES By William Barry 

MEDIEVAL EUROPE By H. W. C. Davis 

THE FRENCH REVOLUTION . By Hilaire Belloc. 
THE IRISH NATIONALITY . . By Mrs. J. R. Green 

CANADA By A. G. Bradley 

THE CIVIL WAR By Frederic L. Paxson 

HISTORY OF OUR TIME (i885- 

191 1) ByC. P. Gooch 

POLAR EXPLORATION (with 

maps) By W. S. Bruce 

THE OPENING UP OF AFRICA By Sir H. H. Johnston 
THE CIVILIZATION OF CHINA By H. A. Giles 
A SHORT HISTORY OF WAR 

AND PEACE ByG. H. Perris 

MODERN GEOGRAPHY By Marion Newbigin 

Future Issues 

A SHORT HISTORY OF EUROPE By Herbert Fisher 

ANCIENT GREECE By Gilbert Murray 

THE REFORMATION* By Principal Lindsay 

A SHORT HISTORY OF RUSSIA By Prof. Milyoukov 
PEOPLES AND PROBLEMS OF 

INDIA By Sir T. W. Holderness 

FRANCE OF TO-DAY By Gabriel Monod 

THE EVOLUTION OF CITIES . By Patrick Geddes 

ANCIENT EGYPT By F. L. Griffith 

THE COLONIAL PERIOD ... By Charles M. Andrews 
FROM JEFFERSON TO LINCOLN By William MacDonald 
RECONSTRUCTION AND UNION 

(1865-1912) By Paul L. Ha worth 

LATIN AMERICA By W. R. Shepherd 



ROME 



BY 

W. WARDE FOWLER, M.A. 

AUTHOR OF "LIFE OF JULIUS CffiSAR," "THE CITY-STATE 

OF THE GREEKS AND ROMANS," "SOCIAL LIFE AT 

ROME IN THE AGE OF CICERO," ETC. 




NEW YORK 
HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY 

LONDON 
WILLIAMS AND NORGATE 



> 



Copyright, 1912, 

BY 

HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY 



THE UNIVERSITY PRESS, CAMBRIDGE, U.S.A. 



&CLA312054 



A 



CONTENTS 

CHAP. PAGE 

I Introductory 7 

II The Advance of Rome in Italy ..... 28 

III The Training of the Roman Character . . 55 

IV The Struggle with Carthage and Hanniral 84 
V Dominion and Degeneracy Ill 

VI The Revolution : Act I. 136 

VII The Revolution : Act II. ...... . 161 

VIII Augustus — The Revival of the Roman Spirit 187 

IX Life in the Roman Empire 212 

X The Empire under the Antonines — Con- 
clusion 229 

BlRLIOGRAPHY 253 

Index 255 



HOME 

CHAPTER I 

INTRODUCTORY 

Let us suppose an ordinary Englishman, 
with no special knowledge of classical history, 
to be looking at a collection of Roman anti- 
quities in the cases of a museum. He will 
probably not linger long over these cases, but 
will pass on to something more likely to 
attract his interest. The objects he is look- 
ing at are, for the most part, neither striking 
nor beautiful, and the same are presented for 
his inspection over and over again as collec- 
tions from various Roman sites. They 
are chiefly useful things, implements and 
utensils of all kinds, and fragments of military 
weapons and armour. In the coins he can 
take no delight, because, apart from the fact 
that, uninterpreted, they have no tale to tell 
him, they do not excite his admiration by 
beauty of design and workmanship. If, in- 



8 ROME 

deed, he were visiting a museum at Rome, he 
would find plenty of beautiful things in it; 
but these are works of Greek artists, imported 
by wealthy or tasteful Romans in the later 
ages of Rome's history. A typical collection 
of genuine Roman antiquities would prob- 
ably have the effect I describe. Utility, not 
beauty, would seem to have been the motive of 
the people who left these things behind them. 
The same motive will also be suggested to 
us if we visit any of the larger Roman works 
either in this country or on the Continent. 
Most of us know the look of a Roman road 
running straight over hill and valley, and 
meant mainly for military purposes, to enable 
troops to move rapidly and to survey the 
country as they marched. In the towns which 
have been excavated, we usually find that the 
most spacious and striking buildings must 
have been the meeting-halls (basilica) , in 
which business of all kinds was transacted, 
and especially business connected with law 
and government. Very often, though not in 
the comparatively poor province of Britain, 
this characteristic of utility is combined with 
another — solidity and imposing size. In this 
well-watered island the Romans did not need 



INTRODUCTORY 9 

aqueducts to bring a constant supply of 
water to their towns, but in Italy and the 
south of France these great works are some- 
times unnecessarily huge and imposing. Even 
when they left the path of strict utility, as in 
their triumphal arches and gateways, for 
which we must go to Trier in Germany, or to 
Orange in the south of France, or to Italy it- 
self, they held strongly to the principles of 
solidity and imposing size. A writer who 
knew their art well has said that their notion 
of the highest of all things, their summum 
bonum, was not the beautiful, but the power- 
ful, and that they thought they had as a 
people received this notion from heaven. 

It would, indeed, be wrong to say that there 
is no beauty in Roman art; but it is quite in 
accordance with what has just been said, 
that even in the best of it there is a strong 
tendency to realism, to matter of fact. In 
their sculpture they were especially strong in 
portraiture, and in depicting scenes of human 
life they never or rarely idealise. A battle 
scene, or a picture on stone of life in a city, 
is crowded with figures, just because it really 
was so, and the work is without that restful- 
ness for the eye which the perfect grouping 



10 ROME 

of a Greek artist so often supplies. So, too, 
in literature; all their greatest poetry has a 
strictly practical object, and bears directly on 
human life. The great philosophical poem of 
Lucretius was meant to rescue the Romans 
from religious superstition; the object of the 
Mneid of Virgil, of which I shall have more 
to say in another chapter, was to recall the 
degenerate Roman of that day to the sense 
of duty in the home and in the State. Their 
one original invention in literary form was 
satire, by which they meant comment, 
friendly or hostile, on the human life around 
them. Their myths and legends, of which 
there was no such abundant crop as in Greece, 
dealt chiefly with the founding of cities, or 
with the heroic deeds of human beings. 1 On 
the whole they excelled most in oratory and 
history; and their prose came to perfection 
earlier than their poetry. 

One other feature of their character shall be 
mentioned here, which is entirely in keeping 
with the rest, and often escapes notice. If in 
the works of their hands and their brains they 

1 The best known of these, and perhaps the most beauti- 
ful, is that of Coriolanus, which has descended from Plutarch 
to Shakespeare, and so become immortal. 



INTRODUCTORY 11 

were not an imaginative people, we can well 
understand that they had not this gift in 
practical life. Imagination in action takes 
the form of adventurousness, as we may see 
in our own history; the literary imaginative- 
ness of Elizabethan England has its counter- 
part in the adventurous voyages of Eliza- 
bethan seamen. The Romans were not an 
adventurous people; they were not imagina- 
tive enough to be so. They penetrated, in- 
deed, into unknown countries; Csesar reached 
Britain and bridged the Rhine, but that great 
man, a true Roman born, had a temperament 
rather scientific than romantic. He did as 
almost all conquering Romans had done 
before him, and were to do after him — he 
advanced solidly, making his way safe behind 
him and feeling carefully in front of him. 
His book about his wars in Gaul was written 
without a touch of imagination, and for 
strictly practical purposes. There is, indeed, 
in the generation before Csesar, an exception 
so striking that it may be said to prove the 
rule; he who reads Plutarch's charming life 
of Sertorius, an Italian from the mountains 
of central Italy, will find both romance and 
adventure in his story. 



12 ROME 

It is plain, then, that we have to do in this 
volume with a people not of imagination, but 
of action: a people intensely alive to the 
necessities and difficulties of human life. 
The Romans were, in fact, the most practical 
people in history; and this enabled them to 
supply what was wanting to the civilisation 
of the Mediterranean basin in the work of 
the Greeks. They themselves were well aware 
of this quality, and proud of it. We find it 
expressed by the elder Cato quite at the be- 
ginning of the best age of Roman literature; 
his ideal Roman is virfortis et strenuus — a man 
of strong courage and active energy. Tacitus, 
in the later days of that literature, says that 
all designs and deeds should be directed to 
the practical ends of life {ad utilitatem vitce). 
Midway between these two, we have the great 
Latin poets constantly singing of the hardi- 
hood and the practical virtues which had 
made Rome great, and Italy great under 
Rome's leadership. "A race of hardy breed, 
we carry our children to the streams and 
harden them in the bitter, icy water; as boys 
they spend wakeful nights over the chase, 
and tire out the whirlwind, but in manhood, 
unwearied by toil and trained to poverty, 



INTRODUCTORY IS 

they subdue the soil with their mattocks, or 
shake towns in war" (Virg., Mn. ix. 607 foil.). 
These lines, though applied to an Italian 
stock, were meant to remind the Roman of 
a life that had once been his. The words in 
which the Romans delighted as expressing 
their national characteristics, all tell the same 
tale: gravitas, the seriousness of demeanour 
which is the outward token of a steadfast 
purpose; continentia, self-restraint; industria 
and diligentia, words which we have in- 
herited from them, needing no explanation; 
constantia, perseverance in conduct; and last, 
not least, virtus, manliness, which originally 
meant activity and courage, and with ripening 
civilisation took on a broader and more 
ethical meaning. Quotations might be multi- 
plied a thousandfold to prove the honest 
admiration of this people for their own nobler 
qualities. As exemplified in an individual, 
Plutarch's life of the elder Cato, which can be 
read as well in English as in the original 
Greek, will give a* good idea of these. 

But it is essential to note that this hard 
and practical turn of the Roman mind was 
in some ways curiously limited. It cannot 
be said that they excelled either in industrial 



14 ROME 

or commercial pursuits. Agriculture was 
their original occupation, and trade-gilds ex- 
isted at Rome very early in her history; but 
the story of their agriculture is rather a sad 
one, and Rome has never become a great in- 
dustrial city. Their first book about hus- 
bandry was translated from the Carthaginian, 
and their methods of commerce they learnt 
chiefly from the Greeks. It was in another 
direction that their genius for practical work 
drew them: to the arts and methods of dis- 
cipline, law, government. 

We can see this peculiar gift showing itself 
at all stages of their development: in the 
agricultural family which was the germ of 
all their later growth, in the city-state which 
grew from that germ, and in the Empire, 
founded by the leaders of the city-state, and 
organised by Augustus and his successors. 
It is seen, too, in their military system, which 
won them their empire; they did not fight 
merely for spoil or glory, but for clearly 
realised practical purposes. As Tacitus says 
of a single German tribe which possessed 
something of this gift, the Romans did not 
so much go out to battle as to war. True, 
they constantly made blunders and suffered 



INTRODUCTORY 15 

defeat; they often "muddled through" diffi- 
culties as we do ourselves; but they refused to 
recognise defeat, and profited by adverse 
fortune. Listen once more to a few words 
of old Cato; in his Origins of Rome, written 
for his son, he wrote: "Adversity tames us, 
and teaches us our true line of conduct, while 
good fortune is apt to warp us from the way 
of prudence. 5 ' Thus they went on from 
defeat to victory, conquest, and government. 
It is worth while not only to lay to heart, but 
to learn by heart, the famous lines in which 
Virgil sums up the Roman's conception of 
his own work in the world — 

"Others will mould their bronzes to breathe 

with a tenderer grace, 
Draw, I doubt not, from marble a vivid life 

to the face, 
Plead at the bar more deftly, with sapient 

wands of the wise, 
Trace heaven's courses and changes, predict 

us stars to arise. 
Thine, O Roman, remember, to reign over 

every race! 
These be thine arts, thy glories, the ways of 

peace to proclaim, 



16 ROME 

Mercy to show to the fallen, the proud with 
battle to tame!" 

JEneid, vi. 847-853 

(Bowen's translation). 

It was this power of ruling, which itself 
implies a habit of discipline, that marked out 
Rome as the natural successor of Greece in 
European civilisation; and it grew naturally 
out of the purely practical bent of the early 
Romans, who were unhampered in their con- 
stant activity by fancy, reflection, or culture. 
Without it, we may doubt if the work of the 
Greeks would have been saved for us when 
the storms from the north, invasions of bar- 
barian peoples, fell at last upon the sunny 
lands filled with the spirit of Greek thought 
and the divine works of Greek artists. To 
Roman discipline, law, and government, we 
owe not only much that even now is every 
day of practical benefit to us, but the preser- 
vation of what we still possess of the treasures 
of Hellenic genius. 

For this reason I assume that this book 
will be taken up by most readers after they 
have made some acquaintance with the his- 
tory and thought of the Greeks. It is true 



INTRODUCTORY 17 

that the history of the two peoples is best 
looked at as one great whole; there is a 
general likeness in their institutions; the form 
of the State, and the ideas of government, 
with which each grew to maturity, were in 
the main the same. But Roman mental 
development was much slower than Greek; 
and Greece was already beginning to lose 
her vitality when Rome was still illiterate 
and unable to record her own history ade- 
quately. Thus Greek influence was the first 
to tell upon the world; the basin of the 
Mediterranean was already permeated by the 
Greek spirit when Roman influence began to 
work upon it; and there can be no doubt 
that he who begins with Roman history 
and then goes on to Greek is reversing the 
natural order of things. 

I will also assume that those who have 
begun to read this book are provided with 
some knowledge of that Mediterranean basin 
which is the scene of Grseco-Roman his- 
tory; such as can be gained by frequent 
contemplation of a good map. They will be 
familiar with Sicily and south Italy, which 
were teeming with Greek settlements when 
Roman history really begins. They will 



18 ROME 

probably have realised how short a step it is 
from Italy to Africa, whether or no Sicily 
be taken as a stepping-stone; Cato could 
show fresh figs in the Roman senate which 
had been grown in Carthaginian territory. 
They will have realised that you can pass 
from the "heel" of Italy to the Hellenic 
peninsula in a single night, as Caesar did when 
he embarked his army at Brindisi to attack 
his rival; such geographical facts are of im- 
mense importance in explaining not only the 
foreign policy of Rome, but also the develop- 
ment of her culture. And thus furnished, 
they will begin to be curious about the destiny 
of the Italian peninsula, of which Greek 
history has had little to tell them. Leaving 
that question for the present, they will wish 
to know why the Greeks did not colonise the 
centre and north of Italy as they did the 
south and south-west, but left room enough 
for a new type of civilisation to grow up there. 
And above all, they will wish to know how 
and why a single city on the western coast 
should have succeeded in building up a great 
power in Italy quite independent of Greece, 
and destined eventually to supersede her, 
which may be reckoned as a factor almost as 



INTRODUCTORY 19 

important in the making of our modern civ- 
ilisation as Hellas herself. 

This last question is the one which I must 
try to answer in the earlier part of this book; 
in the later chapters I shall have to deal with 
another one — how this single city-state con- 
trived to weld together the whole Medi- 
terranean civilisation, strongly enough to 
give it several centuries of security against 
uncivilised enemies in the north, and half- 
civilised enemies in the east. But for the 
moment let us see why the Greeks did not 
permeate Italy with their own civilisation 
as they did Sicily: how it was that they left 
room for a new power, capable eventually 
of shielding them and their work from de- 
struction. To answer this question we must 
consider the nature of the Italian peninsula, 
and the character of the races then living 
in it. 

The simple fact is, that though the shrewd 
commercial Greek had seized on all the best 
harbours in the long, narrow peninsula, these 
harbours were all in the south coast, about 
the "heel" of Italy, or in the south-west 
coast, in the volcanic region of the modern 
Naples, which was itself one of these Greek 



20 ROME 

settlements. The east coast north of the 
"heel" is almost harbourless, as will be 
realised by any one who takes the route by 
rail to Brindisi on his way to Egypt or India. 
Italy is a mountainous country — a fact never 
to be forgotten in Roman history — and its 
mountains, the long chain of the Apennines, 
have their spinal ridge much nearer the east 
than the west coast, and descend upon the 
sea so sharply on that side that for long 
distances road or railway only just finds a 
passage. All along this east coast there was 
nothing to tempt Greeks to settle, and as they 
rarely or never penetrated far inland from 
their settlements, their influence never spread 
into this mountainous region from the many 
seacoast towns of Magna Graecia, as their part 
of Italy was called. On the Bay of Naples 
they had, indeed, a better chance; here there 
was a rich fertile plain stretching away to the 
hills, which on this side come down less steeply 
than on the eastern; this we shall hear of 
again as the Plain of Campania, in which 
Greek influence was very strong and active, 
capable of penetrating beyond its limits 
northward. But north of this again they left 
no permanent settlements; good harbours are 



INTRODUCTORY 21 

wanting, and such as there are were occupied 
about the eighth century B.C. by a people at 
that time as enterprising as themselves, the 
Etruscans. These, too, had been recent im- 
migrants into the peninsula from the east, and 
together with the Greeks they formed the only 
obstacles to the growth of a native Italian 
power — a power, that is, belonging to the 
older races that had long been settled there. 
The Greeks were not likely to interfere with 
such a growth, as we have seen; whether 
the Etruscans were to do so we have yet to 
see. 

It was, in fact, this Etruscan people who 
first gave an Italian stock the chance of 
rising into a great Mediterranean power; and 
in order to understand how this was, we must 
look at a good map of central Italy, which 
gives a fair idea of the elevations in this part 
of the peninsula. Looking at such a map, 
it is easy to see that the long, narrow leg of 
Italy is cloven in twain about the middle by 
a river, the Tiber, the only river of consider- 
able size and real historical importance, south 
of the Po. It is formed of several streams 
which descend from the central mass of the 
Apennines, now called the Abruzzi, but soon 



22 ROME 

gathers into a swift though not a wide river, 
and emerges from that mountainous district 
some five-and-twenty miles from the sea, 
into what we now call the Roman Campagna, 
the Latium of ancient times; skirting the 
northern edge of this comparatively level 
district it falls into the sea, without forming 
a natural harbour, about half-way up the 
western coast of the peninsula. To the north 
of it and of the plain were settled a number of 
cities, more or less independent of each other, 
forming the Etruscan people, whose origin we 
do not yet know for certain, and whose lan- 
guage has never been deciphered from the 
inscriptions they have left behind them; a 
mysterious race, active in war and commerce, 
who had subdued but not exterminated the 
native population around them. To the east 
and south of the Tiber, stretching far along 
the mountainous region and its western out- 
skirts, was a race of hardy mountaineers, 
broken up, as hill peoples usually are, into 
a number of communities without any prin- 
ciple of cohesion except that of the various 
tribes to which they belonged. The northern 
part of this sturdy hill-folk was known as 
Umbrians and Sabines; the southern part as 



INTRODUCTORY 23 

Samnites or Oscans. They all spoke dialects 
of the same tongue, a tongue akin to those 
which most European peoples still speak. 
Lastly, immediately to the south of the Tiber 
in the last part of its course, occupying 
the plain which stretches here between the 
mountains, the river, and the sea, there was 
settled another branch of this same stock, 
speaking another dialect destined to be known 
for ever as Latin. These three sub-races of a 
great stock — Umbrians, Samnites, and Latins 
— are meant when we speak of a native Italian 
population as opposed to Greek or Etruscan 
immigrants. Doubtless they were not the 
aboriginal inhabitants of the country, but of 
older stocks history knows nothing that con- 
cerns us in this book. These are the peoples 
who were destined to be supreme in the 
Mediterranean basin, and eventually to 
govern the whole civilised world. 

It is as well to be quite clear at once that 
the acquisition of this supremacy was not 
the work of one only of these peoples, the 
Latins, or of one city only of the Latins, 
i. e. Rome. It was the work of all these 
stocks which I have called native Italian. 
Roman is a convenient word, and Rome was 



24 ROME 

all along the leader in action and the organis- 
ing power; but the material, and in a great 
part as time went on the brain-power also, 
was contributed by all these peoples taken 
together. They had first to submit to the 
great leader and organiser, Rome, a fate 
against which, as we shall see, they struggled 
long; but no sooner had they submitted than 
they were added to the account of Italian 
development, and with few exceptions played 
their new part with a good courage. 

So much, then, for the Italian peoples who 
were to supersede the Greeks in the world's 
history. But let us now return for a moment 
to the Tiber, and fix our eyes on the last 
five-and-twenty miles of its course, where it 
separates the plain of Latium from the 
Etruscan people to the north. The Latin- 
speaking stock were far more in danger from 
these Etruscans than the Umbrian and 
Samnite mountaineers; nothing but the river 
was between them and their enemies, for 
enemies they undoubtedly were, bent on push- 
ing farther south, like the Danes in England 
in the ninth century of our era. The Latins 
had, indeed, a magnificent natural fortress in 
the middle of their plain, in the extinct 



INTRODUCTORY 25 

volcano of the Alban mountain, some S000 
feet above sea-level; and here, according to 
a sure tradition, was their original chief city, 
Alba Longa. But this was of no avail against 
an invader from the north; it was the river 
that was the vital concern of Latium when 
once the Etruscans had become established 
to the north of it. Now at one point, some 
twenty miles by water from the river's mouth, 
was a group of small hills, rising to a height 
of about 160 feet, three of them almost 
isolated and abutting on the stream, and the 
others in reality a part of the plain to the 
south, with their northern sides falling some- 
what steeply towards the Tiber. Here, too, 
was an island in the river, which might give 
an enemy an easy chance of crossing. On 
this position there arose at some uncertain 
date, but beyond doubt as a fortress against 
the Etruscan power, a city called Roma; and 
there a city has been ever since, known by 
the same name. It is likely enough that it 
was an outpost founded by the city of Alba 
Longa, which eventually itself vanished out 
of history; and this was the tradition of later 
days. If we can accept the motive of the 
foundation — the defence of Latium against 



26 ROME 

her foe, we need not trouble about the many 
legends of it. 

Rome started on her wonderful career as 
a military outpost of a people akin to her, 
and face to face with an enemy with whom she 
had no sort of relationship. If she could but 
hold her position there was obviously a great 
future for her. The position on the Tiber 
was, in fact, strategically the best in Italy. 
It is, as a great Roman historian said, just in 
the centre of the peninsula. There was easy 
access to the sea both by land and water, and 
a way open into central Italy up the Tiber 
valley — the one great natural entrance from 
the sea. She was far enough from the sea 
to be safe from raiders, yet near enough to 
be in communication with other peoples by 
means of shipping. If enemies attacked her 
from different directions inland, she could 
move against them on what in military lan- 
guage we may call "inner lines" — she could 
strike simultaneously from a common base. 
From the sea no power dared attack her, 
until in her degenerate days Genseric landed 
at Ostia in a.d. 455. On the whole, we may 
say that no other city in Italy had the same 
chance, as regards position, of dominating 



INTRODUCTORY 27 

the whole of Italy, and that in those early 
days of her history the Etruscans unwittingly 
taught her how to use this great advantage. 
Just as the kingdom of the West Saxons, and 
their supremacy in England, was built up by 
the stern necessity of having to resist the 
Danes, so the Romans became a leading 
people in Italy by virtue of having to with- 
stand the Etruscans. 

In my next chapter I propose to tell the 
story in outline (and in detail it cannot be 
told for want of knowledge) of the advance 
of the Roman power to the leadership of 
Italy. Then I will try and explain the 
qualities and the organisation which enabled 
her to turn her chances to account. 



CHAPTER II 

THE ADVANCE OF ROME IN ITALY 

I said in the last chapter that if Rome could 
only hold the line of the lower Tiber against 
the Etruscans, great possibilities of advance 
were open to her. How long she held it we do 
not know; but there is hardly a doubt that in 
course of time — some time probably in the 
sixth century B.C. — she lost it, and even her- 
self fell into the hands of the enemy. The tale 
is not told in her legendary annals; but we 
have other convincing evidence. The last 
three kings of Rome seem to have been 
Etruscans. The great temple of Jupiter on 
the Capitoline hill, which was founded at this 
time, was in the Etruscan style, and built on 
foundations of Etruscan masonry, some of 
which can still be seen in the garden of the 
German embassy in modern Rome. Below 
this temple, as you go to the river, was a 
street called the street of the Etruscans, and 



ADVANCE OF ROME IN ITALY 29 

there are other signs of the conquest which 
need not be given here. On the whole we may 
believe that this persistent enemy crossed the 
Tiber higher up, where she already had a 
footing, and so took the city in flank and 
rear. 

Fortunately, the Etruscans were not in the 
habit of destroying the cities they took: they 
occupied and made use of them. They seem 
to have used Rome to spread their influence 
over Latium: they built a temple of Jupiter 
on the Alban hill, the old centre of a Latin 
league : and there is strong evidence that they 
made Rome the head of another and later 
league, with a religious centre in a temple of 
Diana, who was not originally a Roman 
deity, on the Aventine hill overlooking the 
Tiber. All events in this Etruscan period 
are very dim and doubtful, but it looks as if 
the very loss of the line of defence had only 
given the conquered city a new lease of life, 
with a widened outlook and fresh opportu- 
nities. But was she to continue as an 
Etruscan city? The question reminds us of 
a crisis in our own history: was England to 
become a Norman-French country after the 
Conquest? 



30 ROME 

At this time it seems that the Etruscans 
were being harassed from the north by Gallic 
tribes, who had already spread over north- 
west Europe, and were conquering the valley 
of the Po and pressing farther south. This 
may account for the undoubted fact that 
about the end of the sixth century B.C. 
Rome did succeed in throwing off the Etrus- 
can yoke: that the old Roman families united 
to expel their foreign king, and to establish 
an aristocratic republic. Henceforward the 
very name of king (rex) was held in abhor- 
rence by the Romans, and the government 
passed into the hands of two yearly elected 
magistrates, with absolute power as leaders in 
war, and a limited power within the city. In 
the next chapter I will explain this new form 
of government more fully: here it will be 
enough to say that they were called consuls, 
and that they had an advising body (as 
the kings probably had before them) of the 
heads of noble families, called senatus, or 
a body of elderly men. At present let us 
go on with the story of Rome's advance in 
Italy. 

According to the legend, the Etruscans 
made a vigorous attempt to recover Rome. 



ADVANCE OF ROME IN ITALY 31 

This is a picturesque story, and is admirably 
told in one of Macaulay's famous Lays of 
Ancient Rome. But we must pass it over here, 
for we have no means of testing the truth of it. 
Soon afterwards we come upon what seems to 
be a real historical fact, a treaty between 
Rome and the other Latin cities, the text of 
which was preserved for many centuries. 
This treaty shows plainly that henceforward 
we have to reckon Rome and Latium as one 
power in Italy; and this is the first real 
forward step in the advance of Rome. It 
guaranteed in the first place mutual support 
in war; Rome needed support against the 
Etruscans, and the Latin cities at the southern 
end of the plain were liable to be attacked 
by hill tribes from the east and south. Still 
more important as showing the advance of 
civilisation was the sanction of a common 
system of private law. Any citizen of a Latin 
city (including, of course, Rome) was to be 
able to buy and sell, to hold and inherit 
property, in any other city, in full confidence 
that he would be protected by the law of that 
city in so doing; and if he married a woman 
of another city his marriage was legitimate 
and his children could inherit his property 



32 ROME 

according to law. 1 This was going a long 
way towards making a single state of the 
whole of Latium. All the communities were 
on equal terms, and all had certain legal 
relations with each other; and these are two 
of the chief features of a true federation. Now 
all federations were an improvement on the 
isolation of the single city-state, which was 
helpless in those days of turbulence and 
invasion. This one looks like the work of a 
statesman; and if that statesman was a 
Roman, Spurius Cassius.as tradition asserted, 
then Rome had achieved her first victory in 
the arts of statesmanship and diplomacy 
with which she was destined to rule the world. 
Before we go on with our story let us notice 
how well Latium was geographically fitted to 
develop a federation, as compared with the 
more mountainous districts of Italy. Latium 
was a plain, as its name seems to imply; and 
like Boeotia in Greece it was naturally suited 
for federative union, while tribes living in 
the highlands always found it difficult to 
unite. Again, the Latins were jammed into a 

1 The Latin words which expressed these two mutual 
rights, commercium and eonnubium, are still in use in various 
forms in the languages of modern Europe. 



ADVANCE OF ROME IN ITALY 33 

comparatively small space between the hills 
and the sea, and their strength was concen- 
trated by their position: while the Etruscans, 
and the various Italian stocks, were con- 
tinually moving onward to look for better 
quarters, and losing their strength and their 
cohesion in doing so. 

In these early federations of cities there was 
always a tendency for one particular city to 
slip into the position of leader, just as in 
modern federations, that of Switzerland for 
example, there is a continual tendency for the 
central authority to extend its influence. In 
Latium there can be no doubt that Rome 
very soon began to assume some kind of 
headship. Her position on the Tiber, and the 
constant strain that she had to undergo in re- 
sisting the Etruscans, gave her an advantage 
over the other Latin cities, who had to resist 
less constant annoyance from less highly 
civilised enemies. I mean that the Roman 
people had both nerve and brain so continu- 
ally exercised that they developed not only 
brute courage, but endurance, diplomatic 
skill and forethought. For a whole century 
after they expelled their Etruscan kings they 
had to keep up a continual struggle with the 



34 ROME 

great Etruscan city of Veii, which was only a 
few miles to the north of the river, on very 
high ground, and with the smaller town of 
Fidense on the Tiber above Rome, which the 
Veians could make use of to attack them from 
that side. No wonder that when at last they 
succeeded in taking Veii they burnt it to the 
ground. It is said that they thought of 
migrating to that lofty site themselves, and 
abandoning the position on the Tiber; but 
they wisely gave up the idea, and Veii was 
sacked and her goddess Juno brought to 
Rome. The site is a deserted spot at the 
present day. 

It was this prolonged struggle, in which the 
Latins were of course called upon to help, that 
placed Rome in the position of leader of the 
league, and from the moment it was over we 
find her attitude towards the Latins a changed 
one. It is likely enough that she had long 
been growing overbearing and unpopular 
with the other cities, but of this, if it was 
so, we have no certain details. What we 
do know is that at the beginning of the 
fourth century B.C., when a terrible disaster 
overtook Rome, the Latins failed to serve 
her. 



ADVANCE OF ROME IN ITALY 35 

This disaster was the capture and sack of 
Rome by a wandering tribe of Gauls from the 
north, who descended the valley of the Tiber, 
took the Romans by surprise, and utterly 
routed them at the little river Allia, twelve 
miles from the city. These Gauls were for- 
midable in battle and fairly frightened the 
Romans; but, like other Celtic peoples, they 
were incapable of settling down into a solid 
State, or of making good use of their victories. 
They vanished as quickly as they had come, 
and left nothing behind them but an indelible 
memory of the terror they had inspired, and 
many stories of the agony of that catastrophe. 
The most characteristic of these shows the 
veneration of the Romans for what was 
perhaps their greatest political institution, 
the Senate. The citizens had fled to the 
Capitol, where they contrived to hold out till 
relief came; but meanwhile the older Sen- 
ators, men who were past the age of fighting, 
determined to meet their death, and devoted 
themselves, according to an old religious 
practice resorted to in extreme peril, to the 
infernal deities. Each then took his seat in 
state robes at the door of his house. There 
the Gauls found them and marvelled, taking 



36 ROME 

them for more than human. At last a Gaul 
ventured to stroke the beard of one of them 
named Papirius, who immediately struck him 
with his ivory wand: he was instantly slain, 
and of the rest not one survived. We need 
not ask whether this story is true or not, for 
it is impossible to test it: but it is truly 
Roman in feeling, and from a religious point 
of view it falls in line with others that were 
told of the sacrifice of the individual for the 
State. 

This experience was a terrible discipline for 
the Romans, but no sooner had the Gauls 
departed than they began to turn it to prac- 
tical account. They saw that they must 
secure the country to the north of them more 
effectually, and they did so by making large 
portions of it Roman territory, and by estab- 
lishing two colonies there, i. e. garrisoned 
fortresses on military roads. Then they 
turned to deal with their own confederates, 
who perhaps had felt a secret satisfaction in 
the humiliation of a leader of whom they were 
jealous, and were now, especially the two 
great neighbouring cities of Tibur and Prse- 
neste (Tivoli and Palestrina), beginning to 
rise in open revolt. Knowing what happened 



ADVANCE OF ROME IN ITALY 37 

afterwards, we can say that these Latin cities 
were standing in the way of Italian progress : 
but to the ancient city-state independence was 
the very salt of life. 

All public records and materials for history, 
except those engraved on stone, were de- 
stroyed in the capture and burning of Rome 
by the Gauls, so that up to this time Roman 
" history" is not really worthy of the name. 
But from this time onward certain official 
records were preserved, and we gradually pass 
into an age which may truly be called his- 
torical. In detail it will still be questionable, 
chiefly owing to the tendency of Roman 
leading families to glorify the deeds of their 
own ancestors at the expense of truth, and so 
to hand on false accounts to the age when 
history first came to be written down. But 
in the fourth and third centuries B.C. it 
becomes fairly clear in outline. I said in the 
last chapter that the Romans were curiously 
destitute of the imaginative faculty. But no 
people is entirely without imagination, and it 
is most interesting to find the Romans using 
their moderate allowance in inventing the 
details of noble deeds and honourable services 
to the State. Provoking as it is to us, and 



38 ROME 

provoking even to the Roman historian Livy 
himself, who was well aware of it, this habit 
has its own value as a feature of old Roman 
life and character. 

But I must return to the story of the 
advance of Rome in Italy. It seems clear 
that after the Gallic invasion the Latins 
became more and more discontented with 
Roman policy, which probably aimed at 
utilising all the resources of the league and at 
the same time getting complete control of its 
relations to other powers. We have the text 
in Greek, preserved by the historian Polybius, 
of a treaty with Carthage, then the greatest 
naval power in the Mediterranean, which well 
illustrates this: the date is 348 B.C. Rome 
acts for Latium in negotiating this treaty; 
and Carthage undertook not to molest the 
Latin cities, 'provided that they remained faith- 
fid to Rome; nay, even to restore to the 
power of the leading city any revolting Latin 
community that might fall into their hands. 
This plainly shows that revolt was expected, 
and a few years later it became general. But 
in spite of the support of the Campanians in 
the rich volcanic plain farther south, and 
indeed of danger so great that it gave rise to 



ADVANCE OF ROME IN ITALY 39 

another story of the "devotio" of a Roman 
consul to the infernal deities on behalf of 
the State, the Latins were completely beaten 
at the battle of Mount Vesuvius, and the 
Romans were able so to alter the league as 
to deprive it of all real claim to be called a 
federation. 

We saw that any citizen of a Latin city 
could buy and hold property, marry and have 
legitimate children, in any other Latin city, 
knowing that he was protected by the law 
in the enjoyment of these rights. But after 
the rebellion this was all changed. A citizen 
could enjoy these rights in his own city, or at 
Rome, but nowhere else, while a Roman could 
enjoy them everywhere. A citizen of Prse- 
neste, for example, could enjoy them at 
Prseneste or Rome, but not in the neighbour- 
ing cities of Tibur or Tusculum: while a 
Roman could do business in all these cities, 
and be supported in all his dealings by the 
Roman law, which now began gradually to 
permeate the whole of Latium. Rome thus 
had a monopoly of business with the other 
cities, which were effectually isolated from 
each other. To us this seems a cruel and 
selfish policy, and so in itself it was. But we 



40 ROME 

must remember that Rome had been all but 
destroyed off the face of the earth, and that 
the Latins had done nothing, so far as we 
know, to help her. To resist another such 
attack as that of the Gauls, it was absolutely 
necessary for Rome to control the whole 
military resources of Latium, and this she 
could not do in a loose and equal federation. 
She was liable not only to assaults from the 
Gauls, but from Etruscans, and, as we shall 
see directly, from Samnites, and, if we find 
that in the struggle for existence she was at 
times unjust, we may remember that there 
has hardly been a successful nation of which 
the same might not be said. She saw that 
Latium must become Roman if either Rome 
or the Latins were to survive, and she de- 
vised the principle of isolation with this 
object. 

From this time all Latins served in Roman 
armies nominally as allies, but in reality as 
subjects; and all Latins who became Roman 
citizens served in the Roman legions. When 
a military colony was founded, it might be 
either Roman or Latin; but a Latin colony 
meant not necessarily a collection of Latins; 
it might admit any one — Roman, Latin or 



ADVANCE OF ROME IN ITALY 41 

other, who threw in his lot with the new city 
and accepted the two rights of trade and 
marriage described above. Thus the term 
Latin came to mean not so much a man of a 
certain stock as a man with a certain legal 
position, and so it continued for many cen- 
turies, while the new power rising to promi- 
nence in the world came to be known not as 
Latin, but as Roman. 

The last and decisive battle with the 
Latins took its name, as we saw, from Mount 
Vesuvius, and the reader who knows the map 
of Italy will ask how it came to be fought so 
far south of Latium, in the large and fertile 
plain of Campania, near the modern city of 
Naples. The answer is that a powerful State, 
such as Rome was now becoming, is liable to 
be appealed to by weaker communities when 
in trouble; and the Campanians, attacked by 
the hill-men from the central mountainous 
region of the Samnites, had appealed for help 
to Rome. This was given, but the Romans 
found it necessary to make peace with these 
Samnites, and left the Campanians in the 
lurch, and then the latter threw in their lot 
with the Latins, and the Latin war drifted 
south to Campania. At the end of that war 



42 ROME 

they were treated in much the same way as 
the Latins; and thus Rome now found her- 
self presiding with irresistible force over a 
territory that included both the plains of 
western Italy and all its most valuable 
land, and over a confederacy in which all 
the advantages were on her side, and all 
the resources of the members under her 
control. 

But to be mistress of these two plains was 
not as yet to be mistress of Italy. Those 
plains, and especially the southern and more 
valuable one, had to be defended from the 
mountaineers of the central highlands of the 
peninsula: a region which the reader should 
at this point of our story study carefully in 
his map. Towards the end of the Latin war 
these highlanders, Samnites, as the Romans 
called them, had ceased raiding the Cam- 
panian plain, for they in their turn had to 
defend southern Italy against an unexpected 
enemy. The strong and wealthy Greek mer- 
chant-city of Tarentum, just inside the "heel " 
of Italy, destined to play an important part in 
Italian history for the next century, had lately 
had its lands raided by the Samnites and their 
kin the Lucanians to the south of them, and 



ADVANCE OF ROME IN ITALY 43 

had called in Greeks from oversea to help 
them. Here we come into touch with Greek 
history, just at the time when Alexander the 
Great was the leading figure in the Greek 
world. A Spartan king came over to aid 
Tarentum, and lost his life in so doing; then 
Alexander of Epirus was induced to come, 
an uncle of the great conqueror: and after 
a period of success against the Samnites, he 
was assassinated. It is said that Rome came 
to an understanding with him, and it is likely 
enough; there must have been men in the 
great Council at Rome who were already 
accustomed to look far ahead, and keep 
themselves informed of what was going on far 
away in Italy and even beyond the Italian 
seas. Her long struggle for existence had 
taught her venerable statesmen the arts of 
diplomacy, and we are not surprised to learn 
that after the death of Alexander she began 
to form alliances in that far country between 
the Samnites and Tarentum, much of which 
was rich and fertile, in order that when the 
inevitable struggle with the hill-men should 
come, she might have them enclosed between 
two foes — herself and Latium on the north 
and west, and the Apulians and Greeks in 



44 ROME 

the south and east. It seemed as if her power 
and prestige must continually go forward, or 
collapse altogether; the same alternative 
that faced the English in India in the eight- 
eenth century and later. In neither case did 
the advancing power fully realise what the 
future was to be. 

The inevitable struggle with the Samnites 
came, and lasted many years. We need not 
pursue it in detail, and indeed the details 
are quite untrustworthy as they have come 
down to us; but one episode in it is told 
so explicitly and has become so famous, 
that it deserves a place in our sketch as 
showing that hard feeling of national self- 
interest, without a touch of chivalry, that 
is gradually emerging as the guide of Roman 
action in her progress towards universal 
dominion. 

A strong Roman army, under the command 
of both consuls, was pushing to the south 
through the mountains, and fell into a trap 
in a defile called the Caudine Forks, 1 a name 
never forgotten by the Romans. All attempts 

1 The Latin word is fauces, i. e. jaws, etymologically the 
same word as the hause of our Lakeland, which means a 
narrow pass. 



ADVANCE OF ROME IN ITALY 45 

to escape were vain, and they were forced to 
capitulate. The terms dictated by Pontius 
the Samnite general were these: the consuls 
were to bind themselves on behalf of the 
Senate to agree to evacuate Samnium and 
Campania and the fortresses (colonics) which 
had been planted there, and to make peace 
with the Samnites as with an equal power. 
The consuls bound themselves by a solemn 
rite, and the army was allowed to go home, 
after being sent under the yoke, i. e. under 
a kind of archway consisting of one spear 
resting on two upright ones: this was an old 
Italian custom of dealing with a conquered 
army, which may have originally had a 
religious signification. When the disgraced 
legions reached Rome, and the consuls sum- 
moned the Senate to ratify their bond with 
Pontius, the Fathers, as they were called, 
positively refused to do so. The consuls and 
all who had made themselves responsible for 
the terms were sent back to Pontius as his 
prisoners, but not the army. His indignation 
was great, for he knew that Samnium had lost 
her chance, and would never have it again. 
The consuls, of course, had no power to bind 
the Senate, and the Samnite terms were such 



46 ROME 

as the Senate could not accept as the result 
of a single disaster caused by a general's 
blunder: that was not the way in which the 
Romans carried on war. But the disgraced 
army should have been sent back too, and the 
Senate and people knew it. The speech 
which the later Roman historian puts into 
the mouth of Pontius to express his indigna- 
tion, shows that some feeling of shame at 
this dishonourable action had come down in 
the minds of many generations. 

The last effort of this long struggle against 
Rome was a desperate attempt to combine 
the forces of Samnites, Etruscans and Gauls: 
the idea was to separate her armies and 
thus crush her in detail. Even this was a 
failure, and without going into the doubt- 
ful stories of the fighting, we may ask why 
it was so. Beyond all doubt the Roman 
power was for a time in very great peril; 
but in the end it prevailed, and this is a 
good moment for pausing to think about the 
advantages that Rome's genius for organi- 
sation had secured for herself; advantages 
which no other Italian stock seemed able 
to acquire. 

First, she had learnt how to use with profit 



ADVANCE OF ROME IN ITALY 47 

her geographical position; to north, south 
and east she could send armies to strike in 
different directions at the same time; and 
she must have devised some means (though 
we do not know the method) of keeping up 
communication between these armies. The 
stories seem to suggest that the commanders 
of this period belonged to a very few noble 
families whose members had spent their 
whole lives in fighting — not indeed merely 
in fighting battles, but in carrying on war: 
the Fabii and Papirii are particularly promi- 
nent. These veterans must have come to 
know the art of war thoroughly, as it could 
then be applied in Italy, and also the details 
of the country in which they had to 
fight. 

Secondly, the efforts of these tough old 
heroes were admirably seconded by the home 
government, i. e. the Senate, because this 
assembly consisted of men of the like military 
experience, and the leaders among them 
were themselves generals, men who had been 
consuls and had led armies. Though at this 
very time, as we shall see, there was a strong 
tendency towards popular government, yet 
in the direction of war we find no sign that 



48 ROME 

the monopoly of the old families was ques- 
tioned; and as their interests and their 
experience were all of the same type, they 
could act together with a unanimity which 
was probably unknown to their enemies. 
The fact that Rome always at this time, and 
indeed at all times, negotiated and kept in 
touch with the aristocracies in the Italian 
cities, shows how completely the noble fami- 
lies had gained control over the management 
of diplomacy as well as war. 

Thirdly, Rome was now beginning to learn 
the art of securing the conquered country 
by means of military roads and fortresses 
(colonics): an art to which she held firmly 
throughout her history, and to which the 
geography even of Roman Britain bears 
ample testimony. My readers will do well to 
fix their attention for a moment on three of 
these colonies which were founded during this 
long war; they are by no means the only 
ones, but they serve well to show the extent 
of the Roman power in Italy at this time, as 
well as the means taken to secure it. The 
first is Narnia, far up the Tiber valley 
(founded 299 B.C.) on a military road after- 
wards known as the Flaminian Way: this 



ADVANCE OF ROME IN ITALY 49 

was an outpost, with quick communication 
with Rome, against both Etruscans and 
Gauls. The second, Fregellae, a city with a 
sad future, was some seventy miles to the 
south-east of Rome, on a road called the 
Latin Way, but beyond the limits of Latium 
proper, commanding, in fact, the passes be- 
tween Latium and Campania; it was in a 
beautiful situation near the junction of two 
rivers, and became in time a most prosperous 
city. For the third colony we must look much 
further south on the map, at the south-eastern 
end of the mass of the Samnite highlands: 
this was Venusia, with 20,000 colonists, 
destined to separate the Samnites from the 
Greeks and other inhabitants of the heel and 
toe of Italy. It stood on the most famous of 
all the great roads, the Via Appia, which after 
leaving Rome ran nearer the coast than the 
Latin Way, but joined it in Campania, and 
then ran across the hilly country to Venusia, 
and eventually to Brundisium (Brindisi), 
which also became a colony fifty years later. 
These three advantages, duly considered, 
will help the reader to understand to some 
extent how the prize of Italian presidency 
fell to Rome and not to another city: and 



50 ROME 

they will also explain why Rome emerged safe 
and stronger than ever from another peril 
that was now to threaten her existence. 

The great colony of Venusia, as we saw, was 
meant to separate the Greeks of southern 
Italy from the highlanders of Samnium. Of 
the Greek cities by far the most powerful was 
Tarentum, then ruled by a selfish and ill- 
conditioned democracy, apt to be continually 
worrying its neighbours. That Rome should 
sooner or later come into collision with 
Tarentum was inevitable; but the Senate 
tried to avoid this, knowing that the Taren- 
tines would appeal to some Greek power 
beyond sea to help them. Now just across 
the Adriatic, in Epirus, there was a king of 
Greek descent who was looking out for a 
chance of glory by imitating Alexander the 
Great; for Alexander's marvellous career had 
stirred up a restless spirit of adventure in the 
free-lances of the generation that succeeded 
him. Pyrrhus seems to have fancied that he 
could act the part of a knight-errant in free- 
ing the Greeks of the west from the barbarians 
— from the Romans that is, and the Cartha- 
ginians, who were at the moment in alliance. 
When the inevitable quarrel with Rome 



ADVANCE OF ROME IN ITALY 51 

came, and Tarentum invited him, he crossed 
the sea with a small but capable force, de- 
termined to put an end to this new power that 
was threatening to swallow up the Greek 
cities. But he had to learn, and through him 
the Greek world had to learn as a whole, that 
the new power was made of sterner stuff than 
any that had yet arisen in the Mediterranean 
basin. 

Pyrrhus began with a victory, not far from 
Tarentum; it was won chiefly by some ele- 
phants which he had brought with him to 
frighten the Roman cavalry. This shook the 
loyalty of many Italian communities, but the 
Senate was unmoved. The ablest diplomatist 
in Pyrrhus's service made no impression on 
that body of resolute men, trained by long 
experience to look on a single defeat as only a 
" regrettable incident " in a long war. " Rome 
never negotiates while foreign troops are on 
Italian soil;" so, according to the story, the 
aged Appius Claudius told the Greek envoy 
in the Senate-house. Then Pyrrhus tried a 
march on Rome; but he had to learn, like 
another invader after him, that the nearer 
he drew to the city the more difficult his 
task became. A second victory was far less 



52 ROME 

decisive and almost fruitless, and Pyrrhus 
most unwisely evacuated Italy. Tarentum 
had turned against him, unwilling to submit 
to his discipline, and now that wayward city 
fell a victim to the Roman power. The king 
crossed to Sicily to deliver the Sicilian Greeks 
from Carthage, and this he did brilliantly, but 
there, too, the fickle Greeks grew tired of him. 
Returning to Italy, he fought one more battle 
with the Romans, at Beneventum in Sam- 
nium, and lost it. Foiled everywhere, he left 
Italy, with Rome more firmly established 
than ever in the supremacy of the whole 
peninsula: for Tarentum, with its fine har- 
bour, its almost impregnable citadel, and its 
fleet, fell soon afterwards into the hands of 
the Romans. 

Almost the whole Italian peninsula was 
now Roman; or perhaps it is truer to say that 
Rome had become an Italian state. It was 
a wonderful work : perhaps the most wonder- 
ful that Rome ever achieved. The military 
part of it was the result mainly of constantia, 
steady perseverance and refusal to accept 
defeat; the political organisation was the 
result of good sense and good temper com- 
bined with an inflexible will, and a shrewd 



ADVANCE OF ROME IN ITALY 53 

perception of the real and permanent inter- 
ests of Rome. In the third century B.C., at 
which we have now arrived, Italy may be 
described as a kind of federation, in which 
each city has its own alliance with the leading 
one, and no alliance with any other. Each 
has its own government and administers its 
own law, but places all its military resources 
at the disposal of the Roman government. 
The fighting power of the future was to be 
Italy under Roman leadership, and all ques- 
tions of foreign policy were decided by Rome 
alone. There was no general council of the 
whole confederacy. The Roman Senate 
controlled an ever-increasing mass of detailed 
and varied business, having to deal with 
Latins, Italians of the old stocks, Etruscans, 
Greeks and Gauls. How the business was 
done we cannot tell: not a single contempo- 
rary record of it is left. One glimpse of that 
wonderful Senate at work would be worth all 
descriptions of the battles of that century. 
Before the close of the third century B.C. 
that Senate, instead of directing a further 
steady advance, had been forced to defend 
the State against an invader, in the most 
terrible life and death struggle ever experi- 



54 RCttlE 

enced by any people. But in the next chap- 
ter I must pause to try and explain wherein 
consisted the nerve-power, the mental and 
material fibre, of the people destined to rule 
the world. 



CHAPTER III 

THE TRAINING OF THE ROMAN CHARACTER 

I have mentioned some outward circum- 
stances which gave Rome an early training 
in war and diplomacy, and in particular her 
geographical position, exposing her to con- 
stant attack, and yet giving her good chance 
of striking back and advancing. But to 
accomplish all that was told of her in the 
last chapter, more than this was surely 
needed. There must have been a quality in 
this people, individually and as a whole, 
fitting them to withstand so much storm 
and stress, and to emerge from disaster 
with renewed strength to take in hand the 
work of conquest and government. We need 
not, indeed, assume that the people of this 
one city were naturally of stronger character 
than others, than their kinsfolk of the Latin 
cities or other Italians of the same great race. 
All these immigrating stocks, which spread 
themselves, long before history begins, over a 

55 



56 ROME 

primitive population of which we know little 
or nothing, were probably much the same in 
physical and mental build; a fact which will 
help us to understand how they all came 
eventually to be able to unite together as the 
centre of a great empire. But the quality 
or character, which I am to try and explain 
in this chapter, was more strongly stamped 
upon the citizens of Rome than on those of 
other cities, owing to the more continual call 
for them in her case; for all our qualities and 
habits can be made more sure and lasting by 
constant exercise. 

Discipline and duty are the two words 
which best explain, if they do not exactly 
express, the quality here meant; the habit of 
obedience to authority, which is the necessary 
condition of the power of governing, and that 
sense of duty which lies at the root of the 
habit and the power. This aptitude for 
discipline and this sense of duty can be 
traced both in the private and the public 
life of early Rome, in the life of the family 
and in the life of the State. Let us be clear 
at once that the individual as such was not 
as yet an important item of society; society 
was based on a system of groups, and the 



TRAINING OF ROMAN CHARACTER 57 

individual played no part in it in these early 
times except as the member of a group, 
either a group of kin (gens), or a local and 
administrative group (pagus, curia). But the 
only group with which we are concerned in 
this little book, the smallest of all, was the 
familia, another of those immortal words 
which we have inherited from the Latin 
language. This shall be explained first, in 
order to find the discipline and duty of that 
family life: then we will take the State, and 
follow out the same habits reproducing them- 
selves in a more complicated social and politi- 
cal union. 

This word familia did not mean exactly 
what we mean by family; household would 
perhaps come nearer to it, if we understand 
by household a group of individuals support- 
ing itself on the land. It meant not only 
father, mother, and children, but also their 
dependents, whether bond or free. These, if 
bond, were slaves (servi), prisoners of war 
and the children of such prisoners, or per- 
sons who had forfeited their liberty by debt: 
if free, they were clients, who for some reason 
had become attached to the familia in an 
inferior position, and looked to it for subsis- 



5S ROME 

tence and protection. And our picture is 
not complete unless we take into account 
also the divine members of the group, dwell- 
ing in the house or on the land, to whom the 
human members looked for protection and 
prosperity in all the walks of life. Chief 
among these were the spirit of the hearth-fire, 
Vesta: Penates, the spirits of the store-closet 
and its contents: the Lar. the guardian spirit 
of the cultivated land, or, as some think, of a 
departed ancestor; and the Genius of the 
head of the family, which enabled him to 
beget children and so continue the collective 
life of the group. Though these spirits — 
they are hardly yet deities — naturally seem 
to us mere fancies of the primitive Roman 
mind, they were to that mind itself as real 
and active as any human member of the 
group, and we must try to think of them as 
such, for they played a very important part 
in the development of the quality we wish 
to realise. 

Now this group, or rather the human part 
of it, lived under a very simple and effective 
form of government. It was under the abso- 
lute control of a head, the father and husband; 
or, if more than one family lived together, 



TRAINING OF ROMAN CHARACTER 59 

the oldest living father and husband. Over 
wife and children he had a father's power 
(patria potestas), and they were said to be in 
his hand; over the slaves he had a master's 
power {dominium): to his clients he was 
patronus, or quasi-father. His power over 
wife and children was absolute, but it was 
kept from being arbitrary by a wholesome 
custom, of immense importance in all its 
results throughout Roman history, of seek- 
ing the advice of a council of relations before 
taking any extreme step in the way of punish- 
ment for serious offences. This was an 
obligation, a duty, on his part, enforced by 
no law, but by what may be well called an 
even more powerful sovereign than law — the 
custom of the ancestors (mos majorum). His 
power over his client, or his freed slave if he 
had any such, was restrained by customs of 
mutual obligation, which eventually found 
their way into law. His power over his 
slaves was, however, not only absolute but 
arbitrary, and so continued down to the 
latest period of Roman history; yet the 
slave, we must not forget, was really a mem- 
ber of the familia, and as such was probably 
treated as a human being, necessary to the 



60 ROME 

life of the group, and even partaking to 
some extent in its religious worship. 

Let us see how this system of government 
would work out in the practical life of a jam- 
ilia settled on the land, as all such groups 
were during at least a great part of the period 
we have been tracing: for the city itself was 
mainly used as a fortress, into which the farm- 
ing families would come in time of peril, and 
in which they would in course of time possess 
a town dwelling as well as a farm, like the 
leading families of our English shires in the 
Middle Ages. The paterfamilias directed all 
the operations of the farm, no one disputing 
his authority: and he decided all quarrels 
among his subjects and punished all offences. 
The necessary work of the house, the cooking, 
and the spinning of wool for the garments 
of the members (which were then entirely 
woollen), he left to his wife and daughters: 
and thus the wife came to exercise a kind of 
authority of her own, which raised her far 
above the position of a "squaw," and gave 
her in course of time a great influence, though 
an indirect one, in social life. And not only 
had all the members their work to do, under 
this strict control, in keeping themselves alive 



TRAINING OF ROMAN CHARACTER 61 

and clothed, but they all had their duties to 
the divine members, on whom they believed 
themselves dependent for their health and 
wealth. There were simple acts of worship 
every day and at every meal, in which the 
children joined; we may almost think of the 
Head as a priest and of the children as his 
acolytes. And at certain days, fixed in 
ancient times by a council of Heads, and later 
in the city by a calendar, the families of a 
district (pagus) would join together in reli- 
gious festivities, after harvest, for example, or 
after the autumn sowing, to honour and 
propitiate the spirit of the harvested grain 
or of the sown seed. These were often accom- 
panied by games and races, and so the life 
was saved from becoming too sombre and 
monotonous. But though discipline was not 
allowed to destroy freedom and enjoyment, 
the life was on the whole a routine of com- 
mand and obedience, of discipline and duty. 
What of the education which should per- 
petuate these habits? Unluckily we have 
no contemporary record of it for these early 
times, and must guess at it chiefly from what 
we know of the bringing up of his son by the 
elder Cato, a strenuous believer in the old 



62 ROME 

methods, in the second century B.C. As we 
might expect, it seems to have been an educa- 
tion in the active practical life of the farm, 
and in reverence, obedience, and modesty of 
demeanour. Cato taught his boy not only to 
work, to ride, to box, and to swim, but to shun 
all indecency; and was himself "as careful 
not to utter an indecent word before his son, 
as he would have been in the presence of the 
Vestal virgins." He wrote histories for his 
son in large letters, so that he might learn 
something of the illustrious deeds of the 
ancient Romans, and of their customs. In 
his time an education of the mind was be- 
ginning to come into vogue, as well as one of 
the will; but in the period we have been 
surveying this must have been of the most 
meagre kind. Yet it is possible that the idea 
of active duty to the State and its deities, as 
well as to the family and its presiding spirits, 
was all the more vividly kept up in the ab- 
sence of intellectual interests. As life in the 
city became more usual, the boys of good 
families had more opportunity of learning 
what was meant by duty to the State; they 
accompanied their fathers to hear funeral 
orations on eminent citizens, and were even 



TRAINING OF ROMAN CHARACTER 63 

admitted to meetings of the Senate. In this 
way they must have developed a shrewdness 
and practical sagacity invaluable to them in 
after life. 

There is a story of a Roman boy, preserved 
by Cato, which so well illustrates this and 
other features of that early Roman life, that 
I shall insert it here, whether or no it be 
strictly true. A boy who had been with his 
father to the Senate was asked by an inquis- 
itive mother what the Fathers of the Senate 
had been discussing. The boy answered 
that he was strictly forbidden to tell, which 
only excited his mother's curiosity the more, 
and made her press him hard. At last he 
invented what Cato calls a shrewd and witty 
falsehood: he said that the Senate had been 
discussing whether it were better for the 
State that one man should have two wives, or 
one wife two husbands. Much alarmed, she 
went and told other matrons, and next day 
they crowded weeping to the Senate House, to 
petition that one wife might have two hus- 
bands rather than one husband two wives. 
The astonishment of the senators was dis- 
pelled by the boy, who stood out in the midst 
and told his tale; and from that time no boy 



64 ROME 

was allowed to be present at debate save 
this one, who was thus rewarded for his 
honesty and shrewdness. 

This good old Roman story may aptly 
bring us to the second part of my subject in 
this chapter, the training of the citizen in the 
service of the State. But let us pause here 
for a moment to consider what was the Roman 
idea of the State and its function. 

In Italy, as in Greece, the State took the 
form of a city, with more or less of territory 
on which to subsist; in the heart of the city 
was the life of the State. And it is true of 
Italy as of Greece that the process of rising 
to the city from the life of farm or village was 
one of immense importance for humanity, 
enabling man to advance from the idea of a 
bare material subsistence to that of moral and 
intellectual progress. This is the advance 
to what Aristotle called "good life" as dis- 
tinguished from life simply. He meant that 
in the lower stage man has not time or stimu- 
lus to develop art, literature, law, philosophy : 
all his strength is spent in struggle and en- 
deavour — struggle partly with Nature, partly 
with human enemies whom he is ill able to 
resist. The city-state supplied him not only 



TRAINING OF ROMAN CHARACTER 65 

with opportunity for a higher life, but with 
nutriment to maintain it. 

But the Italians never drew from this new 
form of social life the same amount, the same 
quality of nutriment, as did the Greeks. 
Rome did indeed draw enough to fertilise the 
germs of much that was most valuable in her 
own character, and to educate herself for the 
practical work she was to do in the world. 
But the last chapter will have shown that, 
unlike most Greek city-states, she was forced 
by circumstances to continue for centuries a 
life of struggle and endeavour. She had con- 
stant difficulty in keeping herself alive and 
free, and as we shall see, she was hardly ever 
without internal as well as external perils. 
In Greece many States found leisure to rest 
and enjoy the exercise of their higher in- 
stincts — enjoyment which led to the produc- 
tion of works of art and literature: leisure, 
too, to reflect and inquire about Nature in 
man and outside him, and so to develop 
philosophy and science for the eternal bene- 
fit of mankind. But all the strength of Rome 
was used in the struggle for existence, which 
gradually led her on to conquest and domin- 
ion. As we left her at the end of the last 



66 ROME 

chapter, the leading city of Italy, she might 
indeed have passed from struggle to leisure, 
and so to thought and inquiry, turning to 
account the gifts of the various peoples of 
Italy, Etruscans, Gauls, Greeks, as well as 
her own kin. But the long and terrible 
struggle with Carthage, to be told in the next 
chapter, effectually destroyed this chance. 
Her strength was spent when it was over, and 
when her chance came to sit down (so to 
speak), and think, she could not do it. Still, 
her long training in practical endeavour had 
its due result; and the ideas of duty and 
discipline, of law and order, which had carried 
her through so many perils, never wholly 
vanished from the Roman mind. Let us 
turn to trace the progress of those ideas in 
the life of the city-state of Rome. 

When we first begin to see clearly into the 
working of the Roman State, what chiefly 
strikes us is the unlimited power of the magis- 
trate in all the departments of government. 
Just as the head of the family had an absolute 
power over its members, so had the king (rex) 
an unlimited power over the citizens. In the 
family the word for this power was potestas, 
but in the State it was called imperium — 



TRAINING OF ROMAN CHARACTER 67 

one of the greatest words ever coined, surviv- 
ing to the present day in many familiar forms. 
For the Roman it expressed more strikingly 
than any other the idea of discipline in the 
State: it stamped on his mind the inherited 
conviction that lawful authority must be 
implicitly obeyed. Not unlawful authority, 
ill gotten by fraud or violence; for such power 
the word imperium could never be used : but 
authority entrusted to an individual by the 
human members of the State, and sanctioned 
by the consent of its divine members. For 
the imperium must be conferred upon its 
holder by an act of the people, and the gods 
must give their consent by favourable omens; 
both processes, the passing of the law, and 
the obtaining of the auspicia, must be gone 
through according to certain traditional 
methods, and the slightest flaw in these 
would make the choice of the magistrate 
invalid. But once legally in his hands, the 
imperium was irresistible; its outward sym- 
bols, the rods and axes of the lictors, accom- 
panied its holder wherever he went, to remind 
the Roman that the first duty of a citizen 
was obedience to constituted authority. 
This word imperium stood for three differ- 



68 ROME 

ent kinds of power. First, the king was 
supreme in matters of religion, for he was 
responsible for the good relations between the 
human and divine inhabitants of the city, 
for "the peace of the gods" as it was called. 
If this peace, or covenant, were not kept up, 
it was believed that the State could not 
prosper — the very life of the State depended 
on it. 

But now let us note a point of the utmost 
importance in the development of Roman 
public life. The king could not perform 
this duty entirely by himself; no single man 
could have the necessary knowledge of all 
the details of ancient religious custom. So 
he was assisted by a small board of skilled 
experts called pontifices, perhaps also by 
another board of augurs, skilled in the meth- 
ods of discovering the divine will by omens. 
Thus the imperium in religious matters, 
though still legally unlimited, was saved 
from becoming arbitrary and violating an- 
cestral custom: the king is entrusted with 
power which he uses in accordance with the 
advice of sages. 

Secondly, imperium stood for the supreme 
judicial power, for the maintenance of peace 



TRAINING OF ROMAN CHARACTER 69 

between individual citizens. The king had 
an unlimited power not only in deciding dis- 
putes but in inflicting punishments, even that 
of death. But here again, though his power 
was absolute, it was not arbitrary. Custom 
governed the State even more than he did, 
and his work was to see that custom was 
obeyed. In order to make sure that this duty 
was rightly performed, he was provided with 
a council of elderly men (senator es), fathers 
of families, whose advice custom compelled 
him to ask, though it did not compel him to 
take it. Here, then, the exercise of discipline 
was combined with a sense of duty and obliga- 
tion, as in the life of the family; the Senate 
of the State was the same in principle as the 
council of relations in the family. 

Thirdly, imperium stood for the absolute 
power of the commander in war: and here, 
as we might expect, custom seems hardly to 
have interfered with it. A Roman king in 
war was outside the custom of his own State, 
beyond the reach of the protection of his own 
deities, and under the influence of unknown 
ones. Both before starting on a campaign, 
and before entering the city on its return, the 
army had to undergo certain religious rites, 



70 ROME 

which show how nervous even Romans were 
about leaving their own land and gods. 
Custom could not rule here, and the power 
of the general in the field remained through- 
out Roman history not only absolute but arbi- 
trary. Doubtless he could, and often did, not 
only ask advice but take it, but he was never 
even morally obliged to do so: in this one 
department of State activity the wise judg- 
ment of the Romans left the imperium 
practically unhampered. 

Such, then, was the imperium in the hands 
of the chief magistrate, the foundation-stone 
of the Roman government in all periods. 
But what of the people who obeyed it? Of 
the people we unluckily know hardly any- 
thing until nearly the end of the monarchical 
period. We do, indeed, know that, as in 
many Greek city-states, there was a privileged 
and an unprivileged class, and of these two 
classes a word shall be said directly. What 
needs here to be made clear is how this popu- 
lation was placed as regards duty and dis- 
cipline, and our first real knowledge of this 
dates traditionally from the reign of the last 
king but one. Here we find the whole free 
population, privileged and unprivileged, serv- 



TRAINING OF ROMAN CHARACTER 71 

ing in the army as a civic duty, and paying 
such taxes as were necessary mainly for 
military purposes. They served without pay, 
and the infantry — that is, by far the greater 
part, provided their own arms and equipment; 
the cavalry were provided with horses by the 
State, for horses were expensive. Those who 
had most property were considered as having 
the largest stake in the State, and therefore 
as bound to bear the heaviest burden. This 
may be seen in the order of the army for 
battle, for those who could afford the best 
equipment fought in front, the poorest and 
worst armed in the rear. This was the whole- 
some principle that governed the Roman 
army during the period of advance and con- 
quest in Italy. It was an army of citizens 
(populus), all of whom served as a matter of 
duty, and paid taxes as a matter of duty ac- 
cording to their means, leaving all command 
to the holder of imperium, and the officers 
whom he appointed to carry out his orders. 

Thus when the last king was expelled, and 
the kingship came to an end, the people were 
thoroughly well trained in the ideas of duty 
and discipline, and the practical results of 
such a training were obedience as a habit, 



72 ROME 

respect for authority and knowledge, steadi- 
ness and coolness in danger. This people did 
not give way to excitement, either in civil or 
military crises. They not only obeyed their 
rulers, but trusted them. They were not 
much given to talking, but contented them- 
selves with action : and as talk is a more effec- 
tive stimulus to quarrelling than action, they 
did not as yet quarrel. Though Rome was 
destined to pass through many political as 
well as military dangers in the generations 
to come, it was nearly four centuries before 
blood was shed in civil strife in her streets. 

I must close this chapter with a very brief 
sketch of the political history of the period 
of advance in Italy, in order to show how 
their training in duty and discipline kept the 
people steady and sound at home. 

After the expulsion of the last king the 
Roman State became a respublica — that is, 
literally translated, a public thing — or as we 
may perhaps call it, a free State. This is 
another of the immortal words bequeathed to 
modern European language by Latin speech, 
and its meaning is still the same for us as it 
was for the Romans. When Cicero, almost at 
the end of the life of the Roman free State, 



TRAINING OF ROMAN CHARACTER 73 

wrote to a friend, "We have completely lost 
the respublica" he meant that it had passed 
from public management into the hands of 
private and irresponsible individuals. What 
were the essential marks of this "public 
thing/' or free State? As we might expect, 
they are to be found in the treatment of the 
imperium, the governmental centre of gravity, 
by the founders of the respuhlica. 

1. To abolish the imperium was out of the 
question; no Roman ever dreamed of such 
a thing, for it would be like digging up the 
foundations of a building already in part 
constructed. But the imperium was no 
longer to be held for life, nor to be held by a 
single person. It was now to be entrusted to 
two magistrates instead of one, and for a year 
only; at the end of the year the holders, 
henceforward to be called Consuls or Praetors, 
were to lay down their insignia and resign 
their power, becoming simply private citizens 
again. Meanwhile new consuls had been 
elected; and the voice of the whole people 
was to be heard in the election, for it was to 
be effected by the army of citizens, arranged 
according to property as in military service. 
Every Roman who was to obey the imperium 



74 ROME 

was to have a voice in the election of its 
holders, but those who had most stake 
in the State, and served in the front ranks 
in war, were to have a preponderating 
voice. 

2. The dread imperium was now not only 
limited in the period of its tenure, but the 
possibility of an arbitrary use of it was averted 
in two ways. First, the two consuls had a 
veto on each other's action, and both at home 
and in the field they took it in turn to exer- 
cise the imperium. Secondly, they could not 
put a citizen to death in the city unless the 
people in their assembly sanctioned it; in 
the field the Romans wisely left the imperium 
unlimited, feeling, as we still feel, that mili- 
tary discipline needs a more forceful sanction 
than civil. And besides these two restric- 
tions, the council of elders, the Senate, was 
retained to act as a general advising body 
for the consuls, who, however, themselves had 
the power of filling up vacancies in it from 
time to time. We do not know exactly what 
its composition was at this time; but it is 
certain that all who had held the imperium 
had seats in it, as men whose service and ex- 
perience best entitled them to advise and 



TRAINING OF ROMAN CHARACTER 75 

criticise their successors. This principle, that 
ex-magistrates should be members of the 
Senate, was adhered to at all times, and 
eventually made this great council into the 
most effective assembly of men of capacity 
and experience in practical life that the world 
has ever seen. 

Before we leave the imperium, for the 
present, one interesting fact must be noted. 
The Romans were not afraid to withdraw 
for a time these restrictions on the magis- 
trate's power, and to revert to absolute gov- 
ernment, if they thought it necessary for the 
safety of the State. In moments of great 
peril, civil or military, the consul, on the 
advice of the Senate, would appoint a single 
individual to hold office for a fixed time with 
unlimited imperium; and in this case the 
assembly was not called on even to ratify 
the choice, so great was the trust reposed in 
the Fathers of the State. They did not call 
this single magistrate by the hated name of 
Rex, but used another word well known in 
Latium, Dictator. The institution was of 
the utmost value to a people constantly in 
a state of struggle and endeavour, and 
shows well the practical sagacity which a 



76 ROME 

long training in duty and discipline had 
already developed. 

But this practical sagacity was to be put to 
many a hard test in the period we sketched in 
the last chapter. No sooner was the respub- 
lica established, than a great question pressed 
for solution, that of the mutual relations of 
the privileged and unprivileged classes. What 
was really the origin of this distinction of 
class we do not yet know, and perhaps never 
shall. Here the fact must suffice, that the 
privileged, the patricians as they were called, 
the representatives of families belonging to 
the old clans (gentes) were alone deemed 
capable of preserving the peace between 
citizens and gods, or between the citizens 
themselves, and therefore they alone could 
hold the imperium and take the auspices. 
Both classes served in the army and voted 
at elections, but without the chance of hold- 
ing the imperium the plebeians were helpless. 
Yet it is quite certain that they had griev- 
ances of their own, and real ones. We must 
think of them as in the main small holders of 
land, with little or no capital, and constantly 
obliged to borrow either in the form of money 
or stock. They became debtors to the rich, 



TRAINING OF ROMAN CHARACTER 77 

who would usually be the patricians, and the 
old customary law of debt was hard and even 
savage. 

The result of this was, according to the 
traditional story, that once at least, if not 
twice, they actually struck; they left their 
work and went off in a body, threatening 
to found a new city some miles farther up 
the Tiber. They knew well that they were 
indispensable to the State as soldiers, and 
the patricians knew it too. Fortunately, the 
plebeians also knew that the State, with all 
its traditions of religion and government, of 
duty and discipline, was indispensable to 
themselves. They knew nothing of the forms 
and formulse which were deemed necessary 
for the maintenance of peace with gods and 
men. They could not carry away with them 
the gods of the city, under whose protection 
they and their forefathers had lived. They 
would simply be adrift, without oars or 
rudder, and such a position was absolutely 
unthinkable. So they returned to the city — 
so the story runs — and the result was a com- 
promise, the first of a long series of compro- 
mises which finally made Rome into a 
compact and united commonwealth, and 



78 ROME 

enabled her to tide over three centuries of 
continual struggle and endeavour. The story 
of these compromises is too long and compli- 
cated to be told in this book, but the succes- 
sive stages can briefly be pointed out. 

Soon after the strike, or secession, the 
plebeians were authorised to elect magis- 
trates, or more strictly officers, of their own, 
to protect them from any arbitrary use of the 
imperium; these were called Tribunes, be- 
cause the assembly that chose them was 
arranged according to tribes, local divisions 
in which both patricians and plebeians were 
registered for taxpaying purposes. The 
good-will of the patricians in making this con- 
cession is seen in the fact that the tribunes 
of the plebs (as they were henceforward 
called), were placed under the protection of 
the gods (sacrosancti) , so that any one violat- 
ing them was made liable to divine anger. 
As the plebeians grew more numerous and 
indispensable, their assembly and officers 
became steadily more powerful, and eventu- 
ally won the right to pass laws binding the 
whole State. 

Again, it was not long before their igno- 
rance of the customary law and its methods 



TRAINING OF ROMAN CHARACTER 79 

of procedure found a remedy. A code of law 
was drawn up in twelve tables, containing 
partly old customs now for the first time 
written down, partly new rules, some of them 
perhaps imported from Athens. Of this code 
we still possess many fragments, which show 
plainly that it was meant for all citizens, 
whatever their social standing. "The idea of 
legislating for a class ... is strikingly ab- 
sent. The code is thoroughly Roman in its 
caution and good sense, its respect for the 
past, which it disregards only when old cus- 
toms violate the rules of common sense, and 
its judicious disregard of symmetry." * As 
the historian Tacitus said of it long after- 
wards, it was "the consummation of equal 
right." And it was the source of the whole 
mighty river of Roman law, ever increasing 
in volume, which still serves to irrigate the 
field of modern European civilisation. 

There was to be a long and bitter contest 
before the plebeians forced their way into the 
central patrician stronghold of the imperium, 
but even this was accomplished without civil 
war or bloodshed. We hear of a series of 
evasive manoeuvres by the patricians, who 

1 Greenidge, Roman Public Life, p. 105. 



80 ROME 

naturally believed that all would go wrong if 
the duty of keeping "the peace of the gods" 
were committed to men whom the gods could 
not be supposed to take count of. But these 
patrician consuls and senators were respon- 
sible for the State's existence, and it could not 
exist without the plebeians; the two classes 
were authorised by law to intermarry, which 
(strange to say) had been unlawful hitherto, 
and then the old class-feeling and prejudice, 
far exceeding in force any such feeling known 
to us now, gradually subsided. By the middle 
of the fourth century B.C., not only could a 
plebeian be consul, but one of the two consuls 
must be a plebeian. And before that century 
was over the old patrician nobility was begin- 
ning to disappear, giving way to a new one 
based on the leading idea of good service done 
for the State. If a man had held the consul- 
ship, no matter whether he were patrician or 
plebeian, he became nobilis — i. e. distinguished 
— and so, too, did his family. The great 
Roman aristocracy of later times consisted 
of the descendants of men who had thus 
become distinguished. 

I will conclude this chapter with a few 
words about one remarkable institution which 



TRAINING OF ROMAN CHARACTER 81 

well illustrates the Roman instinct for duty 
and discipline. It was in this period, 443 B.C., 
according to the traditional date, that a new 
magistracy was established, intended at first 
merely to relieve the consuls of difficult duties 
for which in that warlike age they had no 
sufficient leisure, but destined eventually to 
become even a higher object of ambition than 
the consulship itself. The Roman love of 
order made it necessary to be sure that every 
citizen was justly and legally a citizen, that 
he fulfilled his duties in the army, and paid 
his taxes according to a right estimate of his 
property. Every four or five years an in- 
quiry had to be made with this object in view, 
and two censors, holding office for a year and 
a half, were now elected to undertake it. 
These censors, though they had no imperium, 
were irresponsible; their decisions were final, 
and they could not be called to account for 
any official act. They were almost always — 
in later times invariably — reverend seniors 
who had held the consulship, men in whose 
justice and wisdom the people could put 
implicit confidence. And such confidence was 
needed; for their power of examination easily 
became extended from details of registration 



82 ROME 

to the personal conduct of the citizen in 
almost every relation of life. All heads of 
families might be questioned about their per- 
formance of family duties, and any shameful 
cruelty to a slave, or injustice to a client, or 
neglect of children, might be punished by 
removal from the list of tribesmen; and this 
meant loss of civil rights, and infamia (civic 
disgrace), a terrible word, greatly dreaded by 
the Roman. Neglect of land or other prop- 
erty, useless luxury, bad faith in contracts or 
legal guardianship — all came in course of time 
to be taken count of by the censors. A 
senator might have his name struck off the 
list of the Senate, and a cavalry soldier might 
be removed from the roll, if the horse pro- 
vided him by the State were ill cared for, or if 
in any other way he were deemed unworthy 
of his position. 

It may be hard for us to understand how 
such a power of inquisition can have been 
submitted to in a free State. But apart from 
the age and standing of the holders of this 
office, and the Roman habit of obedience to 
constituted authority, there are two facts 
that will help us to understand it. One is 
simple: the censors were collegce like the 



TRAINING OF ROMAN CHARACTER 83 

consuls; each had a veto on the action of the 
other, and if that veto were not used, if they 
were unanimous in condemning a citizen, the 
authority of their decision was naturally 
irresistible. The other fact is harder for a 
modern to understand. There was a religious 
element in the work of the censors; the final 
act of a censorship was the religious "puri- 
fication" (lustratio) of the whole citizen body, 
with sacrifice and prayer, in the field of Mars 
outside the walls of the city. What exactly 
a Roman of that day believed, or rather felt, 
to be the result of this rite, we can only guess; 
but we can be sure that he was convinced 
that the life of the State would be imperilled 
without it, and that this conviction was strong 
enough to compel him to submit to the whole 
process of which it was the consummation. 



CHAPTER IV 

THE STRUGGLE WITH CARTHAGE 
AND HANNIBAL 

In these days sober students of history 
wisely leave the oft-told stories of war and 
battle, and busy themselves rather with 
questions of social life, public and private 
economy, and the history of religion, morals 
and scientific inquiry. But there are a few 
wars, great struggles of nation against nation, 
which will always have an absorbing interest: 
partly because of their dramatic character, 
partly because of their far-reaching conse- 
quences; and the long fight between Rome 
and Carthage is assuredly one of these. On 
the Carthaginian side it produced two of the 
most extraordinary men, father and son, of 
whom history has anywhere to tell; and on 
the Roman side it gives us a vivid picture of 
the most marvellous endurance during long 
years of extreme peril that we can find in the 
annals of any people. And probably no war 

84 



STRUGGLE WITH CARTHAGE 85 

was ever so pregnant of results for good and 
ill alike. It welded the whole of Italy south 
of the Alps into a united country under the 
rule of Rome, and launched the Romans on 
a new career of conquest beyond the sea; 
it laid the foundations of the Roman Empire 
as we now think of that great system. Yet 
it left Italy in a state of economic distress 
from which it is hardly untrue to say that 
she has never fully recovered, and it changed 
the character of the Roman people, rich and 
poor alike, for the worse rather than the 
better. 

In order to see clearly how it came about, 
we must once more look at the map of Italy; 
a map of modern Italy will do well enough. 
Let the reader remember that as yet Rome 
had control only over the central and southern 
parts of the whole of what is now the king- 
dom of Italy, and that two other parts of 
that kingdom, which every Italian now re- 
gards as essential to its unity, were in other 
hands. These were: first, the great alluvial 
plain of the river Po (Padus) ; secondly, the 
island of Sicily: strategically speaking, these 
lie on the two flanks of the Roman dominion, 
to north and south respectively. Any power 



86 ROME 

holding central Italy, to be safe from invasion, 
must be in possession of these two positions, 
as a long series of wars has clearly shown, 
beginning with the two now to be sketched. 
The magnificent plain of the Po, stretching 
from the great Alpine barrier to the Apennines 
which look down on the Gulf of Genoa, the 
richest land in all Italy, was then in the hands 
of warlike Gallic tribes, who had settled 
there before the time when they struck 
southward and captured Rome itself; these 
might again become a serious danger, as 
indeed they proved to be in this very war. 
The island of Sicily was, and had long been, 
a bone of contention between the Greek 
settlers who had long ago built cities on the 
most favourable points of its coast, and the 
traders of the Phoenician city of Carthage 
just opposite to it on the coast of Africa. 
Sicily was rich in harbours, and like the plain 
of the Po, also rich in corn, olive, and vine; 
and the Greeks had held on to it so persis- 
tently that with the recent help of Pyrrhus 
they had for a moment been in almost com- 
plete possession of the island. But they 
foolishly deserted Pyrrhus at the critical 
moment, and now again the Carthaginians 



STRUGGLE WITH CARTHAGE 87 

had recovered it, all but the kingdom of 
Hiero of Syracuse, stretching along the 
eastern coast under Mount Etna. Cartha- 
ginian fleets cruised round the island, and 
were often seen off the coasts of Italy as well. 
For Carthage was the mistress of the seas 
in all the western part of the Mediterranean 
basin. 

Carthage was a daughter of the Canaanite 
city of Tyre, belonging to that seafaring 
people known in history as Phoenicians, whom 
the Israelites had pushed down to the coast 
of Palestine without subduing them. The 
genius of the Phoenicians was for trade, and 
the splendid position of Carthage, near the 
modern Tunis, with a rich corn-growing 
country in the rear, had helped her merchant 
princes to establish by degrees what may 
loosely be called an empire of trading settle- 
ments extending not only along the African 
coast, but over that of Sardinia and southern 
and eastern Spain, and including Sicily, as 
we have seen. To maintain this empire she 
had to keep up great fleets, and huge docks 
in her own port; but as her Phoenician popu- 
lation was largely occupied with trade, she 
had to rely for her crews and also for her land 



88 ROME 

forces largely on the native Africans whom 
she had subdued, or on mercenaries hired 
from other races with whom she came in 
contact. Though this was a weak point in 
her armour, she was far the greatest power 
in the western seas, and any other people 
ambitious of power in that region would have 
to reckon with her. So far she had been on 
friendly terms with Rome, and we still have 
the text of three treaties between the two 
states; but the latest of these shows signs of 
mutual distrust, and Rome had now risen 
so high that a collision was all but inevit- 
able. A people ruling in Italy cannot afford 
to have a rival in Sicily and also in undisputed 
command of the sea. 

The collision came in the year 264 B.C., 
and it was the immediate result of an act of 
bad judgment and also of bad faith on the 
part of the Romans. There would be no 
need to mention this here if it did not illus- 
trate a trait in the Roman character which 
is becoming more marked as Rome is drawn 
more and more into diplomatic relations with 
other states. The habit of order and disci- 
pline at home did not bring with it a sense of 
justice and honour in dealing with foreigners. 



STRUGGLE WITH CARTHAGE 89 

The Roman practical view of life, which did 
not include education of the mind and feeling, 
was not favourable to the growth of generous 
conduct except towards a fellow-citizen. 
The Latin word virtus, which expresses the 
practical duties of a citizen, does not suggest 
honourable dealing outside the civic bound- 
ary. Some mental imagination was needed 
for higher aims to make themselves felt in 
public life; "slimness," as the Boers of the 
Transvaal used to call it, is too often charac- 
teristic of Roman diplomacy; and hardness, 
not always stopping short of cruelty, is 
henceforward constantly to be found in their 
conduct towards a beaten foe. 

A rascally band of mercenaries, Italians 
by birth, who had been in the Syracusan 
service, had seized on the old Greek city of 
Messana — the same Messina which quite 
recently met with so terrible a fate in the 
great earthquake. The city lay on the 
Sicilian side of the strait which still bears 
its name, and looked at from an Italian point 
of view, might be called the key to Sicily. 
Exactly opposite to it was Rhegium (Reggio), 
another Greek city which had been treated 
in the same way by another band of brigands; 



90 ROME 

but these had been at once cleared out by 
orders from Rome. In the case of Messana 
the task naturally developed on Hiero, the 
king of Syracuse, a young man of ability 
who had lately made a treaty with Rome; 
but when he made the attempt, the brigands 
appealed for help both to Rome and to 
Carthage. The plain duty of the Senate 
was to support their ally Hiero, or to leave 
the applicants to their fate. But the Cartha- 
ginians might then establish themselves at 
Messana, and that must have seemed to a 
Roman a thing not to be permitted. The 
Senate hesitated for once, and finally referred 
the matter to the people, who voted to sup- 
port the mercenaries against an ally of the 
Roman State. This act of bad faith and 
bad policy cost the Romans a valuable ally, 
and a war with Carthage that lasted without 
a break for twenty-three years. 

It would be waste of space in this little 
book to go into the details of this long and 
wearisome war, which can be read in any 
history of Rome. It was, of course, in the 
main a naval war, and the Romans had as 
yet no fleet to speak of. But now was seen 
the advantage of a united Italy. The diffi- 



STRUGGLE WITH CARTHAGE 91 

culty was overcome by enlisting the services 
of Greek and Etruscan sailors and ship- 
builders; a Carthaginian war- vessel, wrecked 
on the Italian coast, served as a model, and 
a large fleet was soon ready for sea, with 
which, strange to say, the Roman command- 
ers succeeded in the course of a few years in 
clearing the Italian and Sicilian seas of the 
enemy, and even contrived to transport an 
army of invasion to Carthaginian territory. 
This astonishing feat was accomplished 
simply by the invention of a device for grap- 
pling with the enemy's ships, so that they 
could be boarded by Roman soldiers acting as 
"marines." And during this first half of the 
war they also renewed their alliance with 
Hiero, and conquered the whole of Sicily, with 
the exception of the strong city of Lilybaeum 
(now Marsala). 

But all these good results were thrown away 
by the folly of the Roman Senate. Now that 
they had crossed the sea and entered on a 
new sphere of action, they seemed for the 
moment to have lost the prudence and wis- 
dom that had won them the headship of Italy. 
They had two consular armies in Africa 
which seemed to have Carthage herself in 



92 ROME 

their grip; but when she sued for peace they 
offered her impossible terms, and about the 
same time actually recalled one of the two 
consuls with his army to Italy. The old 
Phoenician spirit revived, and turned to des- 
perate courage: an able Greek soldier of 
fortune, Xanthippus, took the Carthaginian 
army in hand, and before long, the remaining 
Roman army was utterly destroyed and its 
commander Regulus was a prisoner. This 
is the Regulus of one of the most famous of 
Roman stories, and one of the most beautiful 
of Horace's Odes. He is said to have gone 
to Rome on parole with an embassy, and 
on its failure to have returned a captive to 
Carthage, where he was put to a cruel death. 
Many critics now reject this tale as pure 
legend, without sufficient reason. It is prob- 
ably true in outline, and it is certain that it 
took firm possession of the Roman mind. 
It thus bears witness to the strong Roman 
feeling of the binding power of an oath, even 
when given to an enemy; for Regulus had 
sworn to return if the mission failed. 

It took Rome many years and enormous 
efforts to recover from this disaster, and from 
the destruction of her fleets by tempests 



STRUGGLE WITH CARTHAGE 93 

which unluckily followed and gave Carthage 
once more the mastery of the sea. Carthage, 
too, had found a man of genius, Hamilcar 
Barca, whose intense hatred of Rome, ever 
growing as she gradually prevailed, inspired 
his people to continue the struggle by sea, 
and his own forces to hold on grimly to a 
mountain fortress in the north-west of Sicily, 
Mount Eryx, the scene of the games in the 
fifth book of Virgil's Mneid. Both sides were 
exhausted and indeed permanently damaged; 
but the strength of Rome was more enduring, 
and in 241 B.C. Hamilcar consented himself 
to negotiate a peace, by which Sicily and 
the adjacent smaller islands passed into the 
hands of Rome for ever. Soon afterwards, 
taking advantage of a deadly war which 
Carthage had to wage with her own mer- 
cenaries, Rome contrived, in that spirit of 
"slimness" already noticed, to get possession 
of both Sardinia and Corsica. This shows 
that the Senate understood the importance 
of these islands for a power in command of 
the western seas; but unjust dealing brought 
its own reward. It is possible that the great 
Hamilcar might have forgiven Rome her 
injuries to his country but for this. As it 



94 ROME 

was, his hatred of her sunk into his soul more 
deeply than ever, and that hatred, springing 
up afresh in the breast of his son Hannibal, 
all but destroyed his enemy off the face of 
the earth. He retired to Spain, to organise 
a Carthaginian dominion there, of which he 
was himself practically king, and which he 
destined as a base of operations against Rome 
in another war; and before he started, as 
Hannibal himself told the story long after- 
wards, the father made his boy of nine years 
old take a solemn oath to cherish an eternal 
hatred of the enemies of his country. 

The plan of invading Italy from Spain 
was forced upon Hamilcar by the fact that 
Rome was in command of the sea; it was no 
longer possible for Carthage to strike at her 
from Africa without a greater effort to recover 
that command than her government of mer- 
chant princes was now disposed to make. 
And the fact that Hannibal was actually 
able to carry out the invasion by land was due 
to the genius and personal influence of his 
father in building up a solid dominion in 
southern Spain with New Carthage (now 
Cartagena) as its capital. Some historians 
have thought that of these two extraordinary 



STRUGGLE WITH CARTHAGE 95 

men the father was the greatest; and it is 
at least true that his was a noble work of 
construction, while his son's brilliant gifts 
were wasted in the attempt to destroy the 
great fabric which Rome had reared in Italy. 
The attempt was unavailing; the solid Roman 
structure survived all the assaults of the 
greatest captain of the ancient world. The 
glamour of Hannibal's splendid victories 
must not blind us to the fact that he made 
two serious miscalculations : he believed that 
the Italians hated Rome as he did himself, 
and would join him to crush her; and he 
hoped, if he did not believe, that Carthage 
would give him substantial help. Had he 
judged rightly on the former point, Rome's 
fate was sealed. But the Italian kinsmen of 
Rome, who had come to recognise in her their 
natural leader, never even faltered in their 
loyalty, 1 and Carthage did but little to help 
him till it was too late. Thus we have in 
this terrible war the strange spectacle of a 
single man of marvellous genius pitting him- 
self against the whole strength of a united 
Italy with military resources, as we know 

1 With the exception of the southern Samnites, who joined 
Hannibal after Cannae. 



96 ROME 

from the accurate Greek historian, Polybius, 
amounting to some 770,000 men capable of 
bearing arms. 

Fascinating as we may find Hannibal's 
wonderful career, much as we may admire 
his nobility of character, a sober judgment 
must lead to the conclusion that no great 
man ever did less for the good of his fellow- 
creatures. During the fifteen years of his 
stay in Italy he did irreparable damage to 
the fair peninsula, and he hardened the hearts 
of the Romans for all their future dealings 
with their foes. When at last he left it he 
was unable to save his own country, and 
spent his last years in exile, ever plotting 
against the enemy that had escaped him. 
A man who is actuated all his life through 
by a single motive of hatred and revenge, 
can never be reckoned among those who have 
done something for the benefit of humanity. 

While Hannibal was gaining the loyalty 
of the southern Spaniards, and organising 
their resources, Rome was occupied in trying 
to extend her power over the Gauls settled 
in the plain of the Po, and so to make sure 
of her northern flank, as she had already 
secured Sicily in the south. The Senate 



STRUGGLE WITH CARTHAGE 97 

knew something of Hannibal's design, and 
hoped to anticipate him in getting a hold 
on that valuable region, the strategical key 
to Italy. But here there was no question 
of gaining the loyalty of the tribes; the Gauls 
were restless and hostile, and had quite 
lately made another determined attempt to 
reach Rome; they actually came within 
three days' march of the city before they 
were defeated in a great battle. In 219-218 
B.C. Roman armies were still busy in driving 
roads northward, and planting two colonies, 
Placentia and Cremona, on Gallic soil and on 
the Po, when Hannibal descended on them 
from the Alps. He had found a pretext for 
war, gathered a force of 100,000 men, passed 
the Pyrenees and reached the Rhone before 
the Senate knew what he was about, and 
eluded a consular army dispatched to stop 
him. Scipio, its commander, with true mili- 
tary instinct, sent his army on to Spain, 
to cut his communications with the base 
he had been preparing so long. This line of 
communication Hannibal never recovered for 
ten years, and was forced to maintain and 
recruit his army on Italian soil. 

That army, from a purely military point 



98 ROME 

of view, was without doubt one of the best 
known to history. It consisted chiefly of 
thoroughly trained Spanish infantry, officered 
by Carthaginians, and of the best cavalry 
in the world, recruited from the Numidians 
of the western region of North Africa. It 
was one of those armies that can go anywhere 
and do anything at the bidding of its general, 
because entire trust in him was the one 
motive actuating it. It was a professional 
army, a perfect instrument of war, a weapon 
admirably fitted to destroy, but without con- 
structive value — with no sap of civilisation 
giving it permanent vital energy. Luckily 
for Rome, this army had shrunk to very 
moderate dimensions when it reached Italy; 
the length of the march, the necessity of 
leaving some troops in Spain, and the terrible 
trials of the crossing of the Alps, where the 
native tribes combined with rock, snow and 
ice to wear it out, had reduced it to less than 
30,000 men. 

Yet after a few days' rest Hannibal went 
straight for the nearest Roman force. This 
force was now on the north bank- of the Po 
under Scipio, who had returned from the 
Rhone to Italy. Pushing it back to the new 



STRUGGLE WITH CARTHAGE 99 

colony of Placentia, where it was joined by 
that of the other consul Sempronius, Han- 
nibal utterly defeated the combined Roman 
armies on the little river Trebbia which runs 
down to that city (now Piacenza) from the 
Apennines. The Roman power in the plain 
of the Po was instantly paralysed by this 
defeat, and the victor at once set himself to 
organise alliances with the Gallic tribes while 
he rested and recruited his weary troops. But 
from the Gauls he got no substantial help; 
that fickle people had no great reason to wel- 
come an invader when once he was in their 
territory. And perhaps this was fortunate 
for him; for if he had marched into central 
Italy as leader of a Gallic army he would have 
strengthened, not weakened, the resistance of 
the whole Italian federation that Rome had 
so solidly organised. His knowledge of the 
motives which held this federation together 
must surely have been seriously imperfect. 

But in the spring he crossed the Apennines, 
and made his way through the marshy and 
malarious district around the lower Arno, 
where it is said he lost an eye from ophthal- 
mia, to meet the consul Flaminius, who had 
been sent to cover the approach to Rome 



100 ROME 

with a large army. Slipping past Flaminius, 
Hannibal concealed his army among the hills 
and woods on the eastern shore of the lake 
of Trasimene, along the western bank of which 
the railway now runs on its way from Flor- 
ence to Rome; and here he lay in wait for 
his prey. Flaminius walked into the trap 
laid for him; his army was totally destroyed, 
and he himself was killed. There was now 
nothing to stop the conqueror if he chose to 
march straight on Rome. 

But Hannibal's plans did not include a 
siege of Rome; he had brought no siege 
apparatus, and at no time during the war 
did he succeed in getting any from Carthage, 
or in making it in Italy. His real object 
was to bring the Italians over to his side, 
to isolate Rome, and to put a free Italy (so 
he is said to have phrased it) in place of a 
Roman dominion. So he turned his back 
on Rome, and made his way at leisure down 
the eastern coast of central Italy to the corn- 
lands of Apulia, which were henceforward 
to serve as his chief base of operations. 
Hence he might easily reach the great sea- 
ports of Tarentum and Croton, and so get 
into touch once more with Carthage, and 



STRUGGLE WITH CARTHAGE 101 

perhaps, too, with another power from whom 
he was already looking for help, Philip, king 
of Macedon. But during this southward 
march he learnt, apparently for the first 
time, that Italy was studded with Roman and 
Latin colonies, each a fortress, each pro- 
visioned and ready to resist him: each, too, 
a miniature Rome, disseminating among the 
Italians the honour and pride of Roman 
citizenship, and the animating spirit of Ital- 
ian unity under Roman leadership. One or 
two of these fortresses he vainly tried to 
take, and he must at this time have begun at 
last to realise that the mortal hatred of an in- 
dividual is no match in the long run for the 
organised vitality of a practical people. 

His one chance was to win another great 
battle, and so to overawe south Italy, to make 
his base absolutely secure, and to force 
gradually northward the leaven of anti- 
Roman feeling on which he calculated. For 
the rest of that year, 217 B.C., he could not 
get this chance; the Senate, still cool-headed, 
had appointed a cool-headed dictator, 1 who 
knew that his slow and steady citizen soldiers 

1 This was Fabius Maximus, who has given his name to 
the familiar phrase, "Fabian tactics." 



102 ROME 

were no good match for a mobile professional 
army skilfully handled, and steadily refused 
to accept battle. Not even when Hannibal 
forced his way northward to the rich plain 
of Campania, and tried to gain over the 
wealthy city of Capua, would Fabius be 
tempted to fight; he dogged the enemy's 
footsteps, and once tried to catch him in a 
snare, from which Hannibal escaped by a 
clever ruse. But next year the Senate dis- 
patched the two new consuls, with an army 
not far short of 100,000 men, to deal with 
the enemy in southern Italy; and here, reluc- 
tant though one at least of them was, Hanni- 
bal enticed them into a battle by seizing a 
valuable depot of stores at a town called 
Cannae, near the sea, in the plain of Apulia. 
Though far inferior in numbers, he contrived 
by consummate tactics to draw the solid 
Roman legions into a net, and then used his 
mobile Numidian cavalry to prevent their 
escape to the rear. The fight became a 
butchery, in which 80,000 Romans are said 
to have fallen. The largest army ever yet 
sent out from Rome was totally destroyed, 
and it would seem as if she could no longer 
escape from her deadly foe. 



STRUGGLE WITH CARTHAGE 103 

At this point, the high-water mark of 
Hannibal's successes, we may pause to see 
how the Senate met the news of this most 
terrible disaster. At no moment in Roman 
history is the sterling quality of the Roman 
character and spirit so conspicuously shown. 
The Senate had to meet not only the imme- 
diate military crisis in Italy, but the problems 
of military and naval policy in Spain, in 
Sicily, and in the plain of the Po. At home, 
too, they had to deal with what we may call 
a religious panic; the people, and especially 
the women, w T ere beginning to lose nerve, 
and to fancy that their gods had forsaken 
them. We can believe the Roman historian 
when he says that any other people would 
have been crushed by a catastrophe like this. 
But the wise men of the Senate simply sat 
down to repair it, never dreaming of giving 
in. The city was made safe, fresh legions 
were enrolled, and thanks were voted to 
the surviving consul "for not despairing of 
the republic." They would not ransom the 
prisoners in Hannibal's hands, nor receive 
the officer whom he sent for this purpose. 
They were not moved even by the news that 
southern Italy, the Rruttians, Lucanians, 



104 ROME 

Apulians, and most of the Samnites, had 
joined the enemy, and that isolated towns 
farther north had deserted them. Capua, 
the second city of Italy, was betrayed to 
Hannibal, and he was thus enabled to advance 
his base from Apulia into the plain of Cam- 
pania, without leaving an enemy in his rear: 
but the Senate did not despair. In due time 
the ranks of this Senate, sadly thinned since 
the war began, were filled up by a dictator 
with the best and most experienced citizens 
available. All possible means were adopted 
of keeping up the idea of "the peace of the 
gods"; an embassy was even sent to Delphi; 
the religious panic speedily quieted down. 
At the beginning of the next year provision 
was made as usual for the military commands 
in Sicily, Sardinia, and Spain, and also for 
a fleet which was being got together at Ostia, 
the port at the mouth of the Tiber. Within 
a few months after the battle all was going 
on in Rome as usual. 

So the overwhelming defeat of Cannse did 
but lead the Romans to victory — to a victory 
of all the nobler elements in their character 
over momentary doubt and despair. A 
people that could recover from that disaster, 



STRUGGLE WITH CARTHAGE 105 

and go quietly about the work of repairing it, 
was not likely to be crushed out of existence 
even by a Hannibal; and though he was to 
remain as a standing menace for many years 
on Italian soil, it may fairly be said that 
henceforward he had no real chance of ulti- 
mate success. Two moments of grave anxiety 
were still to come, but Rome survived them 
both. One of these came three years later, 
when a desperate effort was being made to 
snatch Capua out of Hannibal's grasp. To 
induce the Roman government to raise the 
siege, he made a sudden march on Rome, 
knowing that no covering army was between 
him and the capital. He encamped on the 
Anio, three miles above the city, and rode 
with an escort of cavalry right up to the gates. 
But it was all in vain; the Senate had gath- 
ered levies amply sufficient to hold the walls, 
and after plundering the Roman lands Han- 
nibal fell away again, like a sea-wave spent 
and broken on a rocky shore. 

The last moment of extreme peril came 
five years later, in 207 B.C. The wise fore- 
sight of the Senate at the outset of the war 
had so far secured the Roman hold on Spain, 
and no reinforcements had reached Hannibal 



106 ROME 

from that source. At last his loyal and able 
brother Hasdrubal eluded the Roman army 
there, and by taking a new route — that of 
Wellington in the Peninsular War — avoided 
all opposition from the Romans in northern 
Spain. Communications with Italy were now 
at last open, though not by sea, as they should 
have been had the government at Carthage 
thrown its whole strength into the work of 
building up its naval power afresh. Hasdru- 
bal was forced to cross the Alps, and this 
he did with better knowledge and with less 
loss than his brother. He made his way 
through the Gallic territory and reached 
Ariminum (Rimini) . Hannibal was in Apulia, 
where one consul was holding him in check 
and dealing with disaffected Italians; the 
other was waiting for the invader on the 
great coast road south of Ariminum. Has- 
drubal sent dispatches to his brother inform- 
ing him of his arrival and suggesting plans 
of co-operation ; but there were Roman troops 
everywhere, and the messengers fell into 
the hands of the enemy. The consul in the 
south, Claudius Nero, discovering thus the 
danger, took a step, without orders from 
the Senate, which has made his name for 



STRUGGLE WITH CARTHAGE 107 

ever famous. He left sufficient force to hold 
Hannibal, and slipped away with 7000 
picked men, without being discovered even 
by the most wily of commanders. He 
marched into the camp of Livius, the other 
consul, by night, after a march of some 200 
miles, all the loyal people of central Italy 
feeding and blessing his army as he went. 
Two days later the most decisive battle of 
the war was fought on the banks of the little 
river Metaurus, which runs into the sea from 
the Apennines a few miles south of Arim- 
inum. The Romans were this time completely 
victorious; the invading army was utterly 
destroyed, and Hasdrubal was killed fighting 
hard to the last. Nero went swiftly south- 
wards to his original station, and flung the 
Jiead of Hasdrubal — so it was said — into his 
brother's camp. For the first time during the 
long weary years of the war Rome was mad 
with joy; and almost for the first time in her 
history we note a genuine outburst of grati- 
tude to the gods for this their inestimable 
blessing. Gratitude, whether to god or man, 
was not a conspicuous trait in the Roman 
character; but now, in a moment of real 
religious emotion, the first thought is one of 



108 ROME 

thankfulness that "the peace of the gods" 
is fully restored. It was not only that the 
Senate ordered a public thanksgiving of three 
days, but that men and women alike took 
advantage of it to press in crowds to the 
temples, the mothers, in their finest robes, 
bringing their children with them. 

The rest of the war-story is soon told. The 
man who had let Hasdrubal escape him in 
Spain was a young Scipio, son of a Scipio 
who had done good work and lost his life 
there earlier in the war. He himself was a 
young man of real ability, whose character 
has always been to some extent a mystery. 
He was a new type of Roman, one not wholly 
without imagination, and the long years that 
he spent in Spain without rivals to check him 
had perhaps made him cherish and develop 
his own individuality more than was possible 
for the staid Roman noble of the old type 
at home. He believed profoundly in himself, 
and had the gift of making others believe in 
him. Returning home the year after the 
Metaurus battle, he was elected consul, 
though not yet of the legal age, and had Sicily 
given him as his province, where after many 
vicissitudes the Romans were now supreme. 



STRUGGLE WITH CARTHAGE 109 

He at once proposed to invade Africa, and so 
to force Hannibal to leave Italy; and the 
Senate, though they could not or would not 
risk a large force, gave him leave to make 
the attempt. 

Scipio crossed to Africa in 204 B.C., and ere 
long the Carthaginian government recalled 
Hannibal. The great general obeyed, sadly 
and unwillingly, and in 202 met Scipio in 
battle at Zama and was beaten; the undisci- 
plined levies given him by the government 
were no match for Roman veterans. He 
himself now advised his people to make peace, 
and conducted the negotiations, thus doing 
what he could to make up for the irreparable 
damage done her in the war by his own 
implacable hatred of her rival. Carthage 
was no longer to be a naval power — that was 
definitely secured by the terms accorded her. 
She surrendered Spain to the victors, and 
agreed to pay a large war indemnity by 
instalments during fifty successive years. 
Her foreign policy was to be guided by Rome: 
she could no longer be called an independent 
State. 

So ended this great trial of Roman endur- 
ance. No people has ever gone through a 



110 ROME 

harder test and survived. The sense of duty 
and discipline never once failed them; Romans 
and Italians alike were ready to face death 
at any moment in defence of their country. 
But war, always mischievous, when pro- 
longed can sow the seeds of much evil in 
the future; and we must confess with regret 
that we are to see but little more of the heroic 
qualities that had carried Rome through this 
great struggle. 



CHAPTER V 

DOMINION AND DEGENERACY 

"It was not merely that the disasters of 
the war had opened the eyes of public men to 
abuses which had grown up among them; it 
was not that they hastened to take measures 
by which such disasters might be prevented 
from occurring again. Not so much fore- 
sight as this was required. The question 
was at once simpler and more urgently press- 
ing: it was how to prevent the cultivation 
of the country from falling into a condition 
of permanent decay. . . . Not only did it 
become necessary to inquire of political 
economy what means there were of increasing 
the wealth of a whole nation at once, but 
other reforms, less obviously adapted to the 
immediate need, were now eagerly carried 
into effect/ 5 * 

This passage does not refer to Italy and 
the Roman government after the great war, 

1 Seeley's Life of Stein, II. 422. 
Ill 



112 ROME 

but to Prussia after she had succumbed to 
Napoleon and was forced to rest from sheer 
exhaustion. This rest, skilfully used by 
statesmen of genius, meant for Prussia re- 
covery, and the opening of a great era of 
prosperity. If Rome in like manner could 
have given rest to a weary Italy, and brought 
all her practical skill to bear on the work of 
healing and mending, the next two centuries 
might have been far happier ones for her and 
for the world. But it is hard for young 
nations, as for young men, to realise the 
need of rest, and all the harder in ancient 
Italy, where fighting had hardly ceased to 
be looked on as "the natural industry of a 
vigorous State." The Roman Senate was not 
ripe enough in knowledge of human nature 
to understand the mischief, moral as well as 
material, that a long war can cause, especially 
if the enemy has been in your country harry- 
ing and devouring, no one knowing when his 
turn will come to be ruined. And, indeed, 
we may doubt whether even if Rome's leading 
men had been able to understand the nature 
of the mischief, they would have had the 
skill to discover and apply the necessary 
remedies. 



DOMINION AND DEGENERACY 113 

This mischief and its results must be the 
subject of this chapter, for without getting 
some idea of it we cannot understand the 
perils to which civilisation was exposed in 
the next two hundred years by Roman 
degeneracy, or the way in which they were 
eventually overcome. But I must just glance, 
to start with, at the policy actually pursued 
by the Senate in the period following the war, 
which placed Rome in the position of arbiter 
of the whole Mediterranean world, and mis- 
tress of a territory many times as large as 
Italy. 

The two recent invasions of Italy by formid- 
able enemies must have taught the Senate 
the necessity of making it impossible that 
there should be another. But another might 
yet be looked for — so at least they believed — 
not from Spain or Africa, but from the great 
military power of Macedon. Philip of Mace- 
don had been among Rome's enemies since 
Cannae; but not even Hannibal could per- 
suade him to attack her with vigour, and he 
missed his chance. Roman diplomacy had 
stirred up the Greeks against him, and he had 
plenty to do at home. But no sooner was 
Carthage crushed than the Senate coaxed the 



114 ROME 

tired and unwilling people into declaring 
war against him, and this led in the course of 
the next half-ceMury to the overthrow of the 
Macedonian kingdom, and finally to its 
absorption into what we must now begin to 
call the Roman Empire. At the same time, 
Rome acquired a protectorate over the whole 
of Greece, at first honestly meant to defend 
her against Macedon, but destined to pass 
rapidly into dominion. The Greeks in their 
leagues and cities were never again really 
free. If they could have kept from quarrel- 
ling among themselves, they might have 
endured this protectorate with profit; but 
ere Rome had done with them they were 
to feel her heavy hand. 

Thus the "peasants of the Tiber" became 
masters of the Balkan peninsula as well as of 
that of Italy. In the same period they com- 
pleted the conquest of Italy up to the Alps, 
not without difficulties and defeats, and went 
on driving their roads and planting colonies 
in all parts. In the Spanish peninsula, from 
which the Carthaginians had been finally 
driven, they now established two permanent 
commands (provincice) , one in the basin of 
the Ebro in the north-east, and the other 



DOMINION AND DEGENERACY 115 

in the fertile valleys of the Guadiana and 
Guadalquivir, as the two great rivers of 
southern Spain are now called. From these 
they slowly but persistently, after their man- 
ner, and in spite of many defeats and even 
disgraces, pushed up into the high tablelands 
of central Spain, until they had brought the 
greater part of the peninsula under their 
sway. Here they had to deal with a people 
very different from the weary and exhausted 
Greeks and Macedonians; a people only half 
civilised, but lively, intelligent and capable 
of making excellent soldiers, as Hannibal 
had found. It is to the credit of the Romans 
that, in spite of much cruelty and misgovern- 
ment, they gave this peninsula a real civilisa- 
tion, of which the traces are still abundant 
especially in the south, and a beautiful 
language, which descends directly from their 
own. 

In order to maintain their communications 
with Spain by land as well as by sea, they 
also had to look to the coast between the 
western Alps and the Pyrenees. Here they 
made a lasting alliance with the ancient and 
flourishing Greek colony, Massilia (Mar- 
seille); and in defending Massilia from the 



116 ROME 

attacks of mountain tribes they were gradu- 
ally drawn into the acquisition of a permanent 
hold on the lower valley of the Rhone. This, 
again, in due time very naturally became 
the starting-point for fresh advance into the 
heart of modern France. No one who has 
seen the Rhone from Lyons to Marseilles can 
resist the conclusion that a power in posses- 
sion of its lower reaches must inevitably ad- 
vance along it northward. 

There is yet a fourth peninsula in this 
land-locked sea, known for want of a better 
name as Asia Minor, which juts out from the 
Asiatic continent, and forms a meeting-place 
for Eastern and Western civilisations. This 
was in the last three centuries B.C. the fight- 
ing-ground of the successors of Alexander the 
Great, kings of Macedon, Pergamum, Syria 
and Egypt, who wasted the vigour of human- 
ity in wars that to us seem needless. The 
Romans were soon drawn into a war with 
the king of Syria, an ally of Philip of Mace- 
don, and won a great victory in this peninsula 
in the year 190 B.C. But they annexed no 
territory here until the last king of Per- 
gamum left his kingdom to Rome by will 
some sixty years later. The Senate pre- 



DOMINION AND DEGENERACY 117 

ferred to act as arbitrator, to make alliances, 
to reward friendly states, to use diplomacy 
rather than force; and on the whole they 
succeeded. Their policy was often tortuous, 
sometimes even mean, but in the long run it 
did more good than harm to humanity that 
a young and virile people should interfere 
among these monarchies. 

Thus, whether we look west or east in the 
Mediterranean, we find the Roman power 
predominant everywhere within eighty years 
from the end of the war with Hannibal. It 
is not easy to explain in a few words what 
drove this power onwards. It was not simply 
the commercial motive, as with Carthage. 
It was not simply the desire to conquer 
and annex, for the Senate was slow to under- 
take new duties of government abroad if 
their object could be attained in some other 
way. But what was that object? Un- 
doubtedly it was self-defence to begin with; 
but self-defence, once successful, only too 
easily slips into self-assertion. This self- 
assertion, as we see it in Roman policy, may 
perhaps be compared with that which governs 
German foreign policy now — the determina- 
tion to have a voice in all matters within her 



118 ROME 

"sphere of interest." No Roman senator 
had a doubt that his people were the strong- 
est and most competent to control the world, 
which is exactly what the patriotic German 
believes now. And the constant assertion 
of this proud conviction brought many suitors 
and suppliants to Rome, whose presence 
flattered Roman pride, and whose diplomacy 
sometimes involved the government in new 
wars, giving ambitious consuls their oppor- 
tunity of increasing the fame and the wealth 
of themselves and their families. So in due 
time there arose a dominion of the following 
military commands or provinces: one in 
Sicily, one in Sardinia, two in Spain, one in 
southern Gaul, one in Macedonia with Greece 
attached to it, one in Asia Minor, and one 
in Africa, after the destruction of Carthage 
by her old enemy in 146 B.C. Of the method 
of governing these provinces I will say some- 
thing in another chapter. Now let us try to 
estimate some of the results of these con- 
tinuous wars in distant parts, taken together 
with the long struggle with Carthage. We 
shall find a change in every department of 
the people's life, and in almost all a change 
for the worse. 



DOMINION AND DEGENERACY 119 

First, let us look at that family life which 
formed the essential fibre of the old body 
politic, and provided the most powerful 
factor in the Roman character. We have 
but to think of the immense numbers of 
citizens killed or captured in war, or carried 
off by the pestilences that always follow war, 
to see what paralysis of family life there must 
have been. Fathers and grown-up sons in- 
numerable never came home at all; and long 
service far from home would, in any case, 
deprive the family of the natural influence 
and authority of its head. Mothers might do 
much to fill up the gap, and the tradition of 
the dignified and righteous Roman lady was 
not as yet wholly weakened; but there are 
signs that the women in this period were 
getting steadily more excitable, more self- 
asserting, more luxurious. It is in this age 
that divorce begins to make its appearance, 
a sure sign of the decay of the old family 
life. There were rumours, too, of the poison- 
ing of husbands by their wives, and on one 
occasion two noble ladies were put to death 
for this crime by the verdict of a council of 
relations. In an extraordinary attempt to 
introduce into Italy the exciting orgies of 



120 ROME 

the Greek religion of Dionysus, women were 
among the most prominent offenders. The 
changing position of women at this time 
is illustrated by a famous saying of Cato, 
that "all men rule over women, we Romans 
rule over all men, and our wives rule over 
us." 

With the decay of the old family life, the 
wholesome training of the children in manly 
conduct {virtus) and sense of duty (pietas) 
could not but suffer, too. Old-fashioned 
families would keep it up, but among the 
lower classes it was hard to do so owing to 
bad housing and crowding in the city; and 
in the noble families there was undoubtedly a 
change for the worse, though we know of one 
or two great men of this age who took pains 
with the moral as well as the intellectual 
training of their boys. 1 For a people con- 
trolling the Mediterranean world it was neces- 
sary to educate the mental faculties, and 
more especially to teach a boy to speak and 
read Greek, which was the language of half 
the civilised world, and the language of com- 

1 Plutarch's Lives of Cato the Elder and Mmilius Paullus, 
which can be read in a translation, will give examples of this 
better type of education. 



DOMINION AND DEGENERACY 121 

merce everywhere. Now Rome could not 
supply teachers for this kind of education; 
Romans were not competent, nor would they 
have condescended to such work. The Greeks 
were the one people who could undertake 
what we call the higher education, and they 
were now beginning to swarm in Rome. 
Some Greek teachers were free men, but the 
greater number were slaves captured in the 
wars; and thus the first requisite in a school- 
master, that he should be looked up to and 
willingly obeyed, was too often absent in this 
new education. It is men, not methods, that 
really tell in education. In his heart, as we 
know from many striking passages in Roman 
literature, the grown-up Roman despised the 
Greek, and we may be sure that the Roman 
boy did too. Greek literature and rhetoric, 
now fast becoming the staple of the higher 
education, could never make up for the lack 
of moral discipline. If we find a spirit of law- 
lessness in the coming age, and a want of 
self-restraint in dealing with enemies or op- 
ponents, we shall not be far wrong in ascribing 
it in great part to the loss of the wholesome 
home influence, and to the introduction of an 
education outside the home, which entirely 



122 ROME 

failed to make up for the decay of the simple 
old training in duty and discipline. 

The fact is that the Romans were now 
coming under the influence of a new idea of 
life, in which the individual played a more 
important part than ever before at Rome. 
The Roman of the past had grown up 
modelled on a type and fixed in a group, so 
that the individual had little chance of assert- 
ing himself; but now we find him asserting 
himself in every direction, and in every class 
of society. To think for oneself, even in 
matters of religion; to speak from personal 
motives in the senate or law-courts; to aim 
at one's own advancement in position or 
wealth — all this seemed natural and inevit- 
able to the men of that day. And so by 
degrees the individual became the mainspring 
of action instead of the State. There were 
some noble exceptions, but most of the lead- 
ing men played their own game, and often won 
it at the expense of the State. Many a general 
hurried on operations towards the close of his 
command so as not to be superseded before he 
could earn a triumph, and pass in splendid 
procession up to the temple on the Capitol, 
with chained captives following his chariot. 



DOMINION AND DEGENERACY 123 

And the small men became more and more 
unwilling to serve as soldiers in distant lands, 
and more and more rebellious against dis- 
cipline. In little more than half-a-century 
after Hannibal had left Italy the Roman 
armies were beginning to be incapable of their 
work. 

Along with this too rapid growth of the 
individual, we have to take account of the 
sudden incoming of wealth and growth of 
capital. The old Roman family group had 
no capital except its land and stock. But 
now, as the result of plunder and extortion 
in the provinces, most men of the upper 
classes had some capital in money, and this 
was almost always invested in public works 
and State undertakings of all kinds, e. g. the 
raising of taxes and the fitting out of fleets 
and armies. These things were all done by 
contract, and the contracts were taken by 
companies, in which every man was a share- 
holder who had anything to invest. Thus 
the inflow of wealth brought with it the desire 
of making money, and the forum of Rome 
became a kind of stock-exchange in which 
the buying and selling of shares was always 
going on, and where every man was trying 



124 ROME 

to outwit his neighbour. Of a really produc- 
tive use of capital in industry or commerce 
we hear very little; and it would seem that 
the Roman of that day had no idea of using 
his means or opportunities in ways likely to 
produce well-being in the world. 

If we turn to rural Italy, the prospect is 
hardly less dreary. Incalculable damage had 
been done to agriculture in the great war, 
and agriculture, in the broad sense of the 
word, was almost the only Italian industry. 
Corn, wine, oil, wool and leather had formerly 
been produced in sufficient quantities to keep 
the inhabitants in food and clothing, each 
community growing what it needed, as in 
mediaeval England. But this simple form of 
agricultural economy must have suffered a 
severe shock, not only from the ravages of 
armies, but from the decrease of the working 
population owing to war and pestilence. 

In order to restore a decaying industry 
you must have JLh& men to work it. De- 
population as the result mainly of war was 
a disease epidemic in the Mediterranean in 
this age; and in Italy we know for certain 
how rife it was, for we have the records of 
the census of the body of Roman citizens, 



DOMINION AND DEGENERACY 125 

which show a steady falling-off in this period, 
and we must suppose that the same causes 
were at work among the non-Roman popula- 
tion of the peninsula. There was, indeed, 
a remedy, but it was almost worse than the 
disease — I mean the vast numbers of slaves 
now available for labour. The unskilled 
slaves, captured or kidnapped in Spain, Gaul, 
Epirus, Thrace or Asia Minor, were cheap 
in the Roman market, and would do well 
enough to run a farm with, especially if that 
farm were chiefly a pastoral one, with flocks 
and herds needing no great experience or 
skill to look after. This cheapness, and the 
physical conditions of rural life in a moun- 
tainous country, made cattle-running and 
sheep-tending a profitable industry. Large 
districts of Italy, especially in the centre and 
south, became covered in this period with 
huge estates owned by capitalists, and 
worked by rough and often savage slaves, 
who were locked up at night in underground 
prisons and treated simply as "living tools." 
No ray of hope ever broke in on these miser- 
able beings; no free citizen gave a thought 
either to their condition or the economic 
danger of the system; philanthropy and 



126 ROME 

political economy were unknown in the 
Roman world, for imagination and reflection 
were alike foreign to the Roman mental 
habit. 

Even on the estates of moderate size which 
were not entirely pastoral, slave-labour was 
the rule. We know something of such a 
farm from the treatise on agriculture written 
by Cato at this time, which has come down 
to us entire; and it is plain from what he says 
that though free labour might be employed 
at certain seasons, e. g. at harvest, the eco- 
nomic basis of the business was slave-labour. 
There is no doubt that all over Italy the 
small farm and the free cultivator were fast 
disappearing, with the rapid growth of capital 
and the cheapness of slaves. In the city of 
Rome, now beginning to harbour a vast pop- 
ulation of many races, the number of do- 
mestic slaves tended constantly to increase; 
they were employed in every capacity by men 
of wealth and business. Many of them were 
cultivated men, Greeks for example, who 
could act as clerks, secretaries or teachers, 
and these had a fair chance of earning their 
freedom in time; but great numbers were 
low and vicious beings, who had no moral 



DOMINION AND DEGENERACY 127 

standard but that of obedience to a master, 
no moral sanction except punishment. 

Thus, though the shrinkage of the free 
population was evil enough, the remedy for 
it was even worse. The slave, plucked up 
by the roots from the soil in which he had 
flourished in his native land, deprived of 
family, property, religion, must in the ma- 
jority of cases become a demoralised and 
hopeless being. In the plays of Plautus, 
which date from this period, the slave is a 
liar and a thief, and apparently without a 
conscience. For the slave-owner, too, the 
moral results were bad enough, though not 
so obvious at first sight. A man who is 
served by scores of fellow-creatures who are 
absolutely at his mercy is liable to have his 
sense of duty gradually paralysed. Towards 
them he has no obligations, only rights; and 
thus his sense of duty towards his free fellow- 
citizens is apt to be paralysed too. A habit 
of mind acquired in dealing with one set of 
men naturally extends itself and affects all 
human relations. And so the Roman char- 
acter, naturally hard enough, came in the 
later days of the Republic to be harder than 
ever. In our next two chapters we shall meet 



128 ROME 

with unmistakable proofs of this. Incredible 
cruelty, recklessness of human life, callous- 
ness in dealing with the vanquished and the 
subject peoples, meet us at every turn in that 
dark age of Mediterranean history. Under 
the baleful influence of slavery the hard 
Roman nature had become brutalised; and 
we have to wait for the Christian era before 
we find any sign of sympathy with that vast 
mass of suffering humanity with which the 
Roman dominion was populated. 

We must glance in the last place at the 
change brought about by the wars in another 
department of Roman life, viz. in the working 
of the constitution. The reader will remem- 
ber that in early Rome the salient feature in 
that constitution was the imperium of the 
magistrate, just as in private life the salient 
feature was the discipline of the family under 
the rule of the head of the household. The 
man who held the imperium was irresistible 
so long as he held it, though a wise custom 
made it necessary for him to seek the advice 
of his council, the Senate, in all questions 
of grave importance. But now the long wars 
took the consul and his imperium away from 
the city for long periods, and as the Empire 



DOMINION AND DEGENERACY 129 

began to grow up and include provinces 
beyond sea, those periods became longer and 
longer. There were, indeed, always two 
magistrates with imperium in Rome, the 
praetors, who for long past had been elected 
yearly to help the consuls in judicial business; 
but the prestige of their imperium never 
reached the level of that of the consuls. 
And even when a consul returned home, 
though the majesty of the imperium was 
present in his person as ever, it was not his 
hand that was really on the helm. The de- 
cision of great questions did not lie with him, 
but with his Council, whose knowledge of 
affairs and whose "courage never to submit 
or yield/ 5 had carried Rome safely through 
a long series of unexampled trials. 

In the period after the war with Hannibal, 
the Senate, not the imperium, is clearly the 
paramount power in the working of the 
constitutional machinery. To take a single 
instance: when the people declined to sanc- 
tion the war with Philip of Macedon, the 
Senate directed the consul to convince them 
that they were wrong, and both consul and 
people bowed to its will. They had other 
agents in the tribunes of the people, if the 



130 ROME 

consuls failed them, and would now and 
then even coerce a consul by means of the 
power of the tribune. But what chiefly gave 
the Senate its power was the fact that it was 
the only permanent part of the government. 
A senator held office for life unless ejected 
by the Censor for immorality, while all the 
magistrates were elected for a year only. In 
the Senate there sat for life every man who 
had held high office and done the State good 
service, and as there were some three hundred 
of these, it was almost impossible for the 
yearly holders of imperium to resist their 
deliberate judgments. And for those judg- 
ments the Senate was responsible to no man. 
Probably no assembly has ever comprised 
so much practical wisdom and experience as 
the Roman Senate of this period; but that 
wisdom and that experience was limited to 
the working of the constitution, the control 
of foreign affairs, and the direction and supply 
of armies. As has already been hinted, when 
it came to providing remedies for economic 
and moral evils such as I have been sketching, 
the Senators were useless; they had no train- 
ing in the art of the State physician, and no 
desire to learn how to diagnose disease. They 



DOMINION AND DEGENERACY 131 

were almost all men of the same type, and 
with the same public and private interests. 
They belonged, in fact, to a few noble families, 
and new blood was seldom to be found in 
their ranks; for though they had all at one 
time or other been elected to office by the 
people, the choice of the people almost always 
fell upon members of the old tried families. 
The principle that the son of a family that has 
done good service to the State will be likely 
himself to do such service, seems to have 
taken firm hold of the mind of the Roman 
voter; and thus it came about that the Sen- 
ate, in spite of its great capacity for business, 
gradually became an oligarchical body — the 
mouthpiece of one class of society. The 
principle is by no means a bad one in some 
stages of social growth, but it is sure in the 
long run to produce the vices as well as the 
virtues of oligarchy — the dislike of any kind 
of change, the narrow view of social life, the 
want of sympathy with other classes and of 
the desire to understand their needs. We 
shall see in the next two chapters how these 
oligarchical weaknesses brought the Senato- 
rial government to an ignominious end. It 
had saved the State from its deadliest enemy; 



132 ROME 

it had laid the foundations of the Roman 
Empire; but it failed utterly when called on 
to do the nobler work of justice and humanity. 
This aptly brings us to our last point in 
this chapter. As the Roman oligarchy stood 
to the people, so Rome herself stood as an 
oligarchy to the populations of her Empire. 
The Roman citizen was the one most highly 
privileged person in the civilised world of that 
day. The great prize of his citizenship was 
not, as we might suppose it would be, the 
right to vote in the assemblies, to choose 
magistrates and pass or reject laws, nor the 
right to hold office if elected, for to that dis- 
tinction very few could aspire; it was really 
the legal protection of his person and his 
property wherever he might be in the Empire. 
No one could maltreat his person with impu- 
nity; a fact well illustrated in the life of St. 
Paul (Acts xxii. 25 foil.). He could do busi- 
ness everywhere with the certainty that his 
sales, purchases, contracts, would be recog- 
nised and defended by Roman law, while the 
non-citizen had no such guarantees for his 
transactions. No other city in the Mediter- 
ranean had a citizenship to compare with 
this in practical value, for the Roman law 



DOMINION AND DEGENERACY 133 

was gradually becoming the only system of 
law with a real force behind it. To live a life 
of security and prosperity you must be a 
Roman citizen. 

We, in these days of comparative enlighten- 
ment, might perhaps imagine that with a 
gift like this citizenship in their hands the 
Romans would have been quick to reward 
their faithful Italian allies, who had served 
in their armies all through these wars, by 
lifting them to their own level of social and 
political privilege. But if so, we should be 
ascribing to the human nature of Roman 
times a degree of generosity and sympathy 
which was, in fact, almost unknown. We 
might fancy that they would have grasped 
the fact that their old city-state had out- 
grown its cradle, that Italy and not the city 
of Rome now really supplied the force with 
which the world was ruled, and that they 
would put the Italians on the same level of 
advantage as themselves, at least as regards 
the protection of person and property. But 
after the war with Hannibal the tendency 
was rather in the other direction. All allied 
Italian cities continued to have to supply 
contingents to Roman armies and fleets; yet 



134 ROME 

Rome offered them no privileges to make up 
for these burdens, and her magistrates got 
more and more into the habit of treating 
them as inferiors. The Latins, too, that is 
the old cities of the Latin league, and the 
colonies with Latin right, as it was now called, 
who already had some of the privileges of 
citizenship, were carefully prevented from 
acquiring more, from becoming full citizens 
of Rome. In this exclusive policy, which 
seems to us mean and ungrateful, the Roman 
government undoubtedly lost a great chance, 
and had to pay dearly later on for her 
negligence. 

The fact was that the imperial idea had 
taken hold of the governing Romans with 
a force to which that of our British "imperial- 
ism" cannot compare for a moment. They 
were so busy governing, negotiating, arbitrat- 
ing and making money, that the condition 
and claims of their own city and country 
failed to attract the attention of any but a 
very few among the educated aristocracy. 
Depopulation, decline of agriculture, slavery 
and its accompanying evils, injustice to the 
Italian allies and the ever-growing discontent 
occasioned by it, misgovernment and plunder 



DOMINION AND DEGENERACY 135 

in the provinces, all these sources of mischief 
were now accumulating force, and were before 
long to bring the whole Roman system to the 
brink of ruin. But Rome on the brijik of 
ruin meant civilisation in imminent danger; 
for no other power could any longer with- 
stand the barbarians of northern Europe, 
who were even now beginning to press down 
into sunny southern lands. So it is that 
the story of the succeeding century, the last 
before the Christian era, is one of the most 
thrilling interest. How did Rome survive 
and overcome these dangers with renewed 
strength, and succeed in organising an Empire 
on the firm foundations of law and justice, 
destined to hold the barbarians at bay long 
enough to inspire them with profound respect 
for the civilisation they were attacking? 
This question we will try to answer in the 
remaining chapters of this book. 



CHAPTER VI 

the revolution: ACT I 

Enough was said in the last chapter to 
show that the age we are now coming to, the 
last century before Christ, was one full of 
great issues — not only for Rome, but for all 
western civilisation. The perils threatening, 
both internal and external, were so real as 
to call for statesmen and soldiers of the 
highest quality; and as we shall see, this call 
was answered. It was this century that 
produced most of the famous Romans whose 
names are familiar to us: the two Gracchi, 
Marius, Sulla, Pompey, Cicero, Caesar, and 
finally Augustus, all of whom helped in va- 
rious ways to save Italy and the Empire from 
premature dissolution. It was, in fact, an age 
of great personalities, and one, too, in which 
personal character became as deeply inter- 
esting to the men of the time as it is even now 
to us. For as the disciplinary force of the 
State waned, the individual was left freer to 

136 



THE REVOLUTION: ACT I 137 

make his own force felt; and so great was that 
force at times, that we are tempted to fix our 
attention on the man, and to forget the 
complicated motives and interests of the 
world in which he was acting. Undoubtedly 
we should be wrong in doing so; for a very 
small acquaintance with the facts would 
show us these great men struggling inces- 
santly with difficulties, and carried out of 
their own natural course by adverse currents. 
But none the less it is true that hardly any 
other period of history shows so much, for 
good and evil alike, depending on individual 
character. So as the last chapter dealt 
mainly with perils and problems, our next 
two will be occupied with the efforts of these 
famous men to meet the perils and solve the 
problems. 

Depopulation and the decline of agricul- 
ture were the first of the perils to be considered 
seriously. This was done in the year 133 B.C., 
not by the Senate, whose business it really 
was, but by a young and enthusiastic noble, 
in some ways one of the finest characters in 
Roman history. Tiberius Gracchus had the 
right instinct of the old Roman for duty, and 
for a Roman he had an unusually tender and 



138 ROME 

generous nature; but he had not the experi- 
ence and knowledge necessary for one who 
would take this difficult problem in hand, 
which in our day would be prepared for 
legislation by careful inquiry about facts, 
conducted by authorised experts. His educa- 
tion had been mainly Greek, and a study of 
hard facts did not form a part of it. 

Still, he was able to enlist the help of some 
capable men, and produced and finally carried 
a bill which may be called a Small Holdings 
Act. No one was henceforward to hold more 
than 500 jugera (about 300 acres) of public 
land, or if he had sons, 250 more for each of 
two. Public land was land owned by the 
State, but occupied by private men who paid 
(or ought to have paid) rent for it in some 
form. Land owned as well as occupied by 
private men could not be touched; but there 
was abundance of the other, for the State had 
retained its hold on a large part of the land of 
Italy acquired by Rome. This land was now 
to be divided up in allotments, the State 
retaining its ownership and forbidding sale, 
a futile attempt to keep the settlers on the 
land, even against their will. This coura- 
geous plan for bringing the people back to the 



THE REVOLUTION: ACT I 139 

land was put in action at once, and we still 
have a few of the inscribed boundary stones 
set up by the commissioners chosen to carry 
it out. And there is reason to believe that it 
did some good in regard both to depopulation 
and agriculture. The Senate made no serious 
attempt to interfere with it when once it was 
passed, and it continued in force for many 
years. 

But unluckily the Senate had done all it 
could to prevent the bill passing; they would 
have nothing to say to it, and they put up a 
tribune to veto it. The veto of the tribune of 
the plebs was an essential part of the consti- 
tution, and could not be disregarded; but 
Gracchus, also a tribune, had but one year of 
office, and if he could not get his bill through 
during that year, he must give up the attempt 
for a long while. Enthusiasm got the better 
of prudence; he deliberately broke with law 
and usage; he defied the Senate and its pre- 
rogative, and he carried a bill deposing the 
tribune who acted for the Senate. He also 
proposed to offer himself as a candidate for re- 
election, contrary to the custom if not the law 
of the constitution. With the highest motives 
he thus laid himself open to the charge of 



140 ROME 

making himself master of the State, by 
violating the custom of its forefathers (mos 
majorum). It had always been a maxim of 
Roman law that the man who aimed at 
tyranny might be slain by any one; and 
now that even the best aristocrats believed 
Gracchus guilty, this was the fate that over- 
took him. He was killed on the Capitol, and 
the cowardly rabble made no attempt to save 
him. 

The story is perhaps the saddest in Roman 
history. A little more patience and practical 
wisdom, a little more of the spirit of com- 
promise on either side, might have saved the 
situation. The old Roman discipline had 
avoided violence, and got over constitutional 
difficulties by consent; now Gracchus laid 
a violent hand on the constitution, and was 
repaid with violence by its unworthy de- 
fenders. Intending only reform, he ended 
with starting revolution. 

There was another enemy within the gates 
beside depopulation, one not less to be feared, 
but less easy to realise as an enemy; I mean 
slave-labour. Gracchus may be pardoned for 
making no direct attempt to attack it, though 
just before his tribunate there had been a 



THE REVOLUTION: ACT I 141 

rising of slaves in Sicily which showed the 
military as well as the economic danger of 
the situation. It is said that 200,000 slaves 
were in rebellion there at one time, and the 
war was only ended after a long struggle. 
These risings, more of which followed at 
intervals, and finally a most formidable one 
in Italy sixty years later, were symptoms of 
a disease calling for a very skilful physician; 
but no physician was to be found until Csesar 
tried to make a beginning. As yet the 
Romans had not had time to realise this 
danger; living in an atmosphere of slave- 
labour, they believed that they throve on it. 
And as this was in one sense true, owing to 
the decrease of the free labouring population, 
the evil was too subtle for an uncritical people 
to discern. In spite of all these dangerous 
risings, there is no sign in the copious 
literature of this last century of the Re- 
public of any consciousness of the poison at 
work. 

Nine years after the murder of Tiberius 
Gracchus, his younger brother Gaius, elected 
tribune, took up his work and went far beyond 
his designs. In this most interesting and 
able man we come at last upon a Roman 



142 ROME 

statesman of the highest order; a practical 
man, no mere idealist of the new Greek school, 
and yet a man of genius and a born leader of 
men. We possess a picture of him, evidently 
drawn from the life by one who knew him, 
which shows these gifts at a glance. 1 When 
he was at the height of his activity, busy with 
a multitude of details, he seems to have given 
that eyewitness the impression that he was 
almost a monarch. But a close study of all 
we are told about him seems to prove that 
he was in reality one of those rare men, like 
Caesar later on, who profoundly believe that 
they can do the work needed by the State 
better than any other man, and who are justi- 
fied in that belief. He would see to the carry- 
ing out of his own measures with astonishing 
speed, sparing no pains, amazing even his 
enemies by the unflagging energy with which 
he worked, and by the way he contrived to 
get work out of others. Perhaps the secret 
was that he was a gentleman in the best and 
noblest sense of that word; for Plutarch says 
that in his dealings with men he was always 

1 In Plutarch's Life of him, especially chaps, v. and vi., 
where Plutarch is plainly reproducing the evidence of an 
eyewitness. 



THE REVOLUTION: ACT I 143 

dignified, yet always courteous, invariably giv- 
ing to every man his due. 

In fact, the personality of this man is the 
real explanation of his work. If it had been 
possible for him to retain that personal influ- 
ence which Plutarch emphasises, and to keep 
his legislative power even for a few years, as a 
modern statesman may expect to keep it, it 
is quite possible that Rome might have es- 
caped an era of danger and degeneracy. But 
that could not be. A triple-headed Cerberus 
was guarding the path that led to effectual 
reform: the forms of the old constitution, out 
of date many of them, and unsuited to the 
needs of a great empire: the narrow spirit of 
the oligarchical faction, opposed, for self- 
regarding reasons, to all change: and lastly, 
the mean and fickle temper of the mongrel city 
populace, whose power was sovereign in leg- 
islation and elections. In the effort to over- 
come this Cerberus Gracchus lost his precious 
personal influence, and found his original 
designs warped from their true bearing. He 
survived through two tribunates, in the course 
of which he did much valuable work, but in 
the third year he was brutally and needlessly 
slain by his political enemies. Already Rome 



144 ROME 

had put to death two of the most valuable 
men she ever produced, and in the coming 
century she was to put to death many more. 

He had begun his work by a noble effort so 
to mend the constitution that a reformer 
might be able to pass his laws without break- 
ing it, as Tiberius had been tempted to do. 
He tried to increase the numbers of the Sen- 
ate, so as to leaven that great council, which 
he rightly looked on as the working centre of 
the constitution, with new ideas and wider 
interests. And he sought, too, to solve the 
great problem of citizenship, by giving the 
Italians some effectual share in it, and so at 
least the chance of making their voice heard 
in Roman politics. But for such measures of 
real progress neither Senate nor people were 
ready: the Senate was the stronghold of old 
prejudices, and the people were not pleased to 
admit Italians to its privileges. Both these 
great projects, which show how far-reaching 
Gracchus's views as a statesman were, proved 
complete failures. 

To conciliate the Senate became more and 
more hopeless as Gracchus lost his personal 
influence, and he gave up the attempt. In- 
stead, he dealt the senatorial oligarchy a 



THE REVOLUTION: ACT I 145 

heavy blow by depriving senators of the right 
to sit in judgment on ex-provincial governors 
accused of extortion (a crime now becoming 
only too common), and giving it to the class 
below, the Equites, or men of business. Thus 
he made a split between the two upper 
classes of society, which had very unfortu- 
nate results. Not less unhappy was another 
measure, meant to conciliate the hungry 
free population of the city, on which he must 
depend for the passing of his laws. There 
had long been a difficulty in feeding this 
population: for its number had increased 
beyond all expectation, the corn-supply was 
not properly organised, and the price of grain 
was constantly fluctuating. Recognising the 
fact that any legislator was in peril who could 
not make it impossible that the price should 
rise suddenly, he fixed a permanent price, 
more than half below the normal, to be main- 
tained at State cost, whether or no the State 
were a loser. But here he went too far, and 
gave later and less scrupulous demagogues the 
chance of making still more serious mischief. 
No doubt he thought that the State need not 
be a loser, if production, transport, ware- 
housing and finance were organised as he 



146 ROME 

meant to organise them; but there is also 
little doubt that he was mistaken, and that 
henceforward the "people" were really being 
fed largely at the expense of the State, and 
lapsing into a condition of semi-pauperism. 

I have said enough to show how sad was the 
failure of the first real statesman produced 
by Rome. Yet Gracchus was able to do some 
useful work which survived. Under his 
auspices was passed a great law, of the text 
of which we still possess about one-third, 
for the trial of provincial governors accused 
of extortion : and we know of another, bearing 
his own name, which regulated the succession 
to these governorships with justice and 
wisdom. Also he took up his brother's land 
bill, and carried it on with that practical 
persistency which is reflected, as we saw, in 
Plutarch's life of him. But in spite of high 
aims and some successes, his story is a sad 
one; and the loss to Italy and the Empire 
at that moment of a man of righteous aims 
and practical genius was simply incalculable. 

Whatever else the Gracchi did, or failed 
to do, they undoubtedly succeeded, both in 
their lives and in their deaths, in shaking the 
power and prestige of the senatorial govern- 



THE REVOLUTION: ACT I 147 

ment; and nothing had been put in its place, 
nor had it even been reformed. Hencefor- 
ward for a long period there was no constitu- 
tion that could claim an honest man's loyalty 
or devotion; the idea of the State was growing 
dim, and the result was inefficiency in every 
department. The governing class was corrupt 
and the army undisciplined, and this at a time 
when there was coming upon Rome, and upon 
the civilised world, a period of extreme peril 
from foreign enemies. This corruption and 
inefficiency became obvious a few years after 
the death of the younger Gracchus in a long 
struggle with a Numidian chief in the prov- 
ince of Africa, who contrived to outwit and 
defy Roman envoys and Roman armies, by 
taking advantage of the corruptibility of the 
one and the indiscipline of the other. Luckily 
for Rome this war produced a great soldier in 
Gains Marius, a "new man" of Italian birth, 
and another in L. Cornelius Sulla, a man of 
high patrician family; and these two, though 
destined to be the bitterest foes, brought the 
war to a successful end. 

But a far greater peril was threatening Italy 
herself. As we look at the map of Italy, or 
better still (if we have the chance) as we look 



148 ROME 

up at the huge rampart of the Alps from 
the plain of the Po, we are tempted to think 
of this great barrier as impenetrable. But 
mountain ranges are always weak lines of 
defence, and history, ancient and modern 
alike, has abundantly proved that Italy is 
open to invasion from the north. Hannibal 
and his brother had pierced the western flank 
of the range, where later on there were regular 
thoroughfares between Rome and her western 
provinces; and at the eastern end, where 
the passes gradually lessen in height, access 
was easy into Italy from the north-east. 
Beyond this mountain barrier, at the time we 
have now reached, there was much disturbance 
going on: hungry masses of population were 
moving about in search of fertile land to settle 
in, themselves pressed on by other peoples in 
the same restless condition. In 113 B.C. a 
great migrating host, apparently of Germans, 
but probably gathering other peoples as it 
advanced, seemed to threaten the weak point 
of the eastern Alps. 

A consul with an army was in Illyria, and 
tried to stop them in the country now called 
Carinthia, but was badly beaten. If there 
had been a man of genius at their head, the 



THE REVOLUTION: ACT I 149 

enemy might have penetrated into Italy; as 
happened again just a century later, there 
was nothing to stop them between the Alps 
and Rome. But the great host was not 
tempted, and pursued its way westward. In 
109 they suddenly appeared beyond the west- 
ern Alps, where they destroyed another consu- 
lar army, and yet another fell before the Gauls 
of that region. Then in 105, at Orange, in 
Roman territory, while trying to cover the 
road to Massilia and so into Italy, the Romans 
experienced a defeat almost as terrible as that 
of Cannae, and half the Empire lay open to 
the victors. But once again they left their 
prey untouched, and passed westwards in 
search of easier conquests. 

Rome had a breathing-time of nearly three 
years, and she also had the right man to 
save her. Marius remodelled the army, 
revolutionising it in equipment, tactics, and 
discipline. For material he was driven hard, 
and had to find recruits as best he could, 
drawing them from all parts of the Empire: 
but he had time to drill them into fine soldiers, 
and to lay the foundation of a marvellously 
perfect human defence for Mediterranean 
civilisation. The result was one great victory 



150 ROME 

near Marseilles, and another at the eastern 
end of north Italy, into which the barbarians 
had at last penetrated: and Italy was once 
more secure. 

Now we have to see how this peril, or rather 
the effort made to escape it, led to changes of 
the most far-reaching character in the Roman 
power and polity. Italy had not been saved 
by Roman armies or the Roman government, 
but by Marius and the army which he had 
created. For five successive years Marius 
was consul, contrary to all precedent, away 
from Rome; and the army he created looked 
to him, not to Rome, for pay, promotion, and 
discharge. We may call that host of his a 
Mediterranean army under the command of 
an Italian. It was far more like Hannibal's 
army than like the old Roman citizen armies 
that had won the supremacy in Italy; it was 
a professional army devoted to its general, 
but with little thought of the Roman State 
whose servant he was. And henceforward, 
until Augustus restored the sense of duty to 
the State, the Roman armies, excellent now 
as fighting machines, and destined to secure 
effective frontiers for the Empire, were the 
men of Marius, Sulla, Pompey, Caesar, and a 



THE REVOLUTION: ACT I 151 

constant source of anxiety and danger for 
the State whom they were supposed to 
serve. 

This "long-service army" brought Rome 
face to face with another difficulty, and led 
indirectly to another great peril. When the 
soldiers returned home after many years of 
service in distant regions, what was to be done 
with them? Many, perhaps most of them, 
had no homes to go to. The veterans might 
naturally demand some permanent settle- 
ment, but the Senate showed no sign of appre- 
ciating the problem, and in this matter the 
general was helpless without the Senate. So it 
happened that many of them lapsed into the 
crowded city, to pick up a living we know not 
how, with the help of the distribution of cheap 
corn. Among them were beyond doubt 
numbers of non-citizens, who could not legally 
vote in elections or legislation, and were 
inadequately protected in regard to person 
and property, in spite of all the long service 
they had gone through. These men began to 
offer themselves as voters, and to exercise the 
rights of citizenship illegally; yet the con- 
fusion of the registers was such that they could 
not be detected. At last the adulteration of 



152 ROME 

the Roman citizen body became so obvious 
that the consuls of 95 B.C. passed a law with 
the object of making it clear who was a citizen 
and who was not, and of eliminating those 
who were not really privileged. 

But it was now too late to take such a step. 
News of it spread over all Italy, and it was 
construed as a deliberate attempt to exclude 
Italians from the citizenship. Five years later 
another vain attempt was made by a noble 
tribune to do as Gracchus had wished to do, 
to extend the citizenship and to enlarge the 
Senate: but he was assassinated before his 
laws were passed, and then at last there fol- 
lowed the inevitable outbreak, perhaps long 
meditated. The social war, as it is called, in 
reality a civil war, was a crisis in the history 
of European development. When it was over, 
the ancient city-state of the Greeks and 
Italians had vanished in Italy, and in its place 
arose a new form of polity, for which there 
was then no name. 

The sturdy peoples of central Italy entered 
on the desperate venture of setting up a rival 
power against Rome; a plan which, if suc- 
cessful, would have paralysed Rome's work 
in the world whether for good or evil. They 



THE REVOLUTION: ACT I 153 

chose the city of Corfinium, in the heart of 
the Apennines, some hundred miles east of 
Rome, gave it the new significant name 
Italica, and made it, as Washington is now, 
the city-centre of a federation, where deputies 
from the various members should meet and 
deliberate under the presidency of consuls. 
But now was seen the value of the strategical 
position of Rome. She could strike in any 
direction from inner lines, while safe from 
attack or blockade by sea; but Corfinium had 
no such natural strategic advantage, nor any 
unifying power. Yet the Italians were for 
some time sucqessful in the field, and Rome 
was for a whole year in the utmost peril. 
At the end of that year (90 B.C.) the Etruscans 
and Umbrians to north and east joined the 
confederates, and then for the first time Rome 
was likely to be put on the defensive, with 
enemies on her left flank, as well as on her 
right and in front. So a law was hastily passed 
giving the precious citizenship to all who had 
not taken up arms; and this was the begin- 
ning of a process by which, in some few years, 
the whole of Italy became Roman in the eye 
of the law, while, on the other hand, it might 
be said not untruly that Rome became 



154 ROME 

Italian. Henceforward we have to think of 
the whole peninsula as forming the material 
support of Mediterranean civilisation. 

With this great change one might have 
expected that peace and harmony would 
return to Italy. But, on the contrary, she is 
now about to enter on the most terrible time 
that she has ever known; even her miserable 
feuds of the late Middle Ages never quite 
reached the horror of those of Marius and 
Sulla. It is hard to explain this; but looking 
back at what was said in the last chapter about 
the causes of demoralisation, it is possible to 
make a guess. We have to think of a vast 
slave State, worn out in the struggle with 
dangers within and without, enfeebled by 
constant warfare, and now given over into the 
hands of powerful military masters, with hosts 
of veterans at their beck and call. The State 
seemed to have lost its claim to loyalty, even 
to consideration: and in its place were rival 
generals, leaders also of political factions — in 
these years two, Marius the self-seeking 
champion of the Italians and the Roman 
plebs, and Sulla the self-seeking champion of 
the old aristocracy. All principles were lost 
on either side in the intensely bitter hatred of 



THE REVOLUTION: ACT I 155 

the parties and the personal rivalry of the 
leading men. It happened that a war 
was threatening in the East, of which 
we shall hear more in the next chapter; 
and the command in this war, the great 
prize of the moment, became a bone of 
contention outweighing all interest of the 
State. 

The prize fell to Sulla; but no sooner was 
his back turned on Italy than the Marian 
faction fell on their political enemies and 
sought to destroy them by wholesale murder. 
Compromise was utterly forgotten; all the 
brutality of unbridled human nature was let 
loose. And when Sulla returned from the 
East, after driving the enemy out of Roman 
territory, the massacres were revenged by 
more massacres. The loss to Italy of many 
thousands of her best men, and among them 
scores who might have done good work in 
the world, was a calamity never to be re- 
paired. 

Where, one may ask, was the old Roman 
gravitas and pietas, the self-restraint and sense 
of duty that had won an empire? It would 
seem as if the capacity for discipline were 
entirely lost, except in the long-service army. 



156 ROME 

But the mere fact that in the army this sur- 
vived is one not to be neglected, even if it 
were exercised less on behalf of the State than 
in the interest of the individual commander. 
For if there could be found a statesman-soldier 
who could identify himself with the true inter- 
est of the State, and so bring back not only 
the army, but the people to a right idea of 
Rome's position and duty in the world, the 
Empire and civilisation might yet be saved. 
Without the army these could not be de- 
fended; and the one thing wanting was to 
make the army loyal to the State as well as 
to its general. Only the general himself could 
secure this loyalty, by making himself the true 
servant of the State. 

But the man into whose hands Rome had 
now fallen was one who could not possibly 
identify himself with the best interests of the 
State, because an unsympathetic nature had 
denied him the power of discerning what those 
interests were. Sulla has been compared to 
Napoleon, and in one or two points the com- 
parison holds good; but the two were utterly 
unlike in the main point, the power of sympa- 
thetic discernment. Napoleon, cruel and un- 
scrupulous as he often was, showed plainly, 



THE REVOLUTION: ACT I 157 

when he organised the institutions of France, 
or Switzerland, or Egypt, that he understood 
the needs of those nations: he divined what 
would enable them to advance out of stag- 
nation to some better form of life, social and 
political. But Sulla, though he saw that the 
call of the moment was for order at almost 
any price, for peace, strong government, 
and reform, went about his work in a way 
which proved that he did not delight in it, 
or care for the people for whom he was legis- 
lating. He did what was necessary for the 
moment, but did it with force ill concealed 
under constitutional forms. So no wise man 
rejoiced in his work, and the Roman people 
as a whole felt no loyalty towards him. He 
provided in many State departments an 
excellent machinery, but not the motive force 
to work it. 

Nothing in history shows better how much 
in remedial legislation depends on the spirit 
in which it is undertaken. Sulla saw that the 
great council, the Senate, must be the central 
point and pivot of government, unless indeed 
there were a master at hand, like himself, to 
undertake it; that the popular assemblies, 
untrained in discussion and affairs, could not 



158 ROME 

do the work of administration. Though the 
theory of the constitution had always been 
that the people were sovereign, he contrived 
that the Senate, which had so long practically 
governed under an unwritten constitution, 
should now rule without let or hindrance on 
a basis of statute law; and here we see an 
unwritten constitution growing into a written 
one, as with us Britons at this moment. 
By a great law of treason, the first on the 
Roman statute book, he made it almost 
impossible to defy the Senate without the 
risk of political effacement. 

This may be called reactionary, but under 
the circumstances it was not a reaction to 
be complained of. The pity was that this 
master legislator had really none to be grateful 
or loyal to him but his own army and follow- 
ers. His constitutional legislation was for 
the most part swept away soon after his 
death, and there was no one to lament. On 
the other hand, all that he did that was not 
strictly political, and in particular his reor- 
ganisation of what we may call the civil ser- 
vice, and of the criminal law and procedure, 
was so obviously progressive and valuable 
that no one ever attempted to destroy it; and 



THE REVOLUTION: ACT I 159 

some of his laws of this kind held good 
throughout Roman history. 

Sulla attained his power in 81 B.C., resigned 
it in 79, and died next year at his villa on the 
warm Campanian coast, where he had gone 
to enjoy himself in self-indulgence and literary 
dilettantism. Here he wrote that autobiog- 
raphy of which some few fragments have 
come down to us in Plutarch's Life of him — 
a life which will repay the reader, even in 
translation. One of these fragments has 
always seemed to me to throw real light on 
the man's strange nature, and on the imper- 
fection of his work. "All my most happy 
resolutions," he wrote, "have been the result, 
not of reasoning, but of momentary inspi- 
ration." In other words, Sulla did not believe 
in thinking over a problem, and herein he was 
a true Roman. He hoped to do the right 
thing on the spur of the moment. Thus it was 
that no one ever knew what he would do; no 
one could trust him nor believe in him. Like 
so many in that and succeeding ages he be- 
lieved profoundly in Fortune: he called him- 
self Sulla the Fortunate, and gave like names 
to his two children. What exactly he meant 
by Fortuna we cannot say; but we may be 



160 ROME 

sure that it was no such conception of a 
power ruling the world as might guide a 
statesman's feet out of the path of self- 
seeking into a more bracing region of high 
endeavour. 



CHAPTER VII 

the revolution: act II 

With the death of Sulla ends what we may 
call the first act of the Roman Revolution. 
We are now in the middle of a revolution in 
more than one sense of that word. The con- 
stitution and the government of Rome are 
being slowly but surely changed, and at the 
same time the era of the free and independent 
city-state of the Grseco-Roman world is 
being brought to an end. Both these changes, 
as we can see now, were inevitable; without 
them the civilised world could not have 
been defended against barbarian invasion, or 
Italy united into a contented whole possessed 
of Roman citizenship. In the first act, as I 
have called it, the immediate danger of in- 
vasion was checked, both in north and east, 
and Italy had become Roman, enjoying per- 
fect equality with Rome under the great body 
of Roman law now being rapidly developed. 

But, in truth, this inevitable work of change 

161 



162 ROME 

was not as yet half done. It was soon found 
that both in north and east some definite 
system of frontier must be fixed, or the Em- 
pire would be in continual peril from without. 
It was also found that Sulla's constitution 
would not work, and that to defend the 
frontiers of civilisation effectively there must 
be a government of sterner force, whatever 
form that force might take. Thus in the 
second act of the Revolution we have two 
main points to attend to: first, the settle- 
ment of the frontiers against Oriental despots 
and wandering hordes of Germans : secondly, 
the acquisition of power by a great soldier- 
statesman, Julius Caesar, and the abandon- 
ment, as a working power, of the ancient 
polity of Senate and people. And inasmuch 
as this period of revolution was also the age 
of the best and purest bloom of Latin litera- 
ture, I must find space for a few words about 
Cicero, Lucretius, and Catullus. 

I said in the last chapter that there was a 
very dangerous enemy threatening the eastern 
or Greek part of the Empire. This was 
Mithradates, king of Pontus, that part of 
Asia Minor which borders on the Euxine 
(Black Sea) eastwards: a man of genius and 



THE REVOLUTION: ACT II 163 

ambition, and by no means to be reckoned a 
barbarian. It is curious that he began his 
great career by protecting Greek cities against 
their enemies, and one is tempted to ask 
whether he might not have been at least as 
beneficent a champion and master for the 
Greek world as Rome herself. But we must 
look at things with Roman eyes if we are to 
understand the work of Rome in the world; 
we must think of Mithradates as the Romans 
then did, as the deadly enemy alike of Greek 
freedom and of Roman interests. 

His armies had invaded Greece in 87 B.C. 
and had even occupied Athens, while the 
Greek cities of Asia Minor had willingly sub- 
mitted to him: the whole Hellenic world 
was fast coming under his sway. Then Sulla 
had expelled his generals from Greece proper, 
and had forced him to accept such conditions 
of peace as kept him quiet for a few years. 
But when Sulla was dead he started on a 
fresh career of conquest, and once more the 
Roman protectorate of Greek civilisation 
was broken down. For a time it looked as 
if no power could restore it. The sea was 
swarming with pirates from Cilicia, who 
constantly harassed the Roman fleets, and 



164 ROME 

ventured even as far as Italy, snapping up 
prisoners for sale as slaves in the great slave- 
market at Delos. And behind Mithradates 
and these pirates there was another power 
even more formidable. Tigranes, king of 
Armenia, had also been extending his domin- 
ions southward, and was even in possession 
of Syria and Judaea at the time of which 
we are now speaking, 75 B.C. Should the two 
kings unite their forces and policy, it would 
be all but impossible for Rome to remain 
the mistress of the eastern Mediterranean and 
the Hellenic world. It was another example 
of Rome's wonderful good fortune that this 
alliance was never solidly effected till too 
late. 

The Senate, left by Sulla to govern the 
world, soon showed that it was incapable of 
grasping the necessity of vigorous action in 
the East. It was not till 74, four years after 
Sulla's death, that they sent out a really 
capable general with an adequate force. 
Lucullus, whose name has become a by-word 
for wealth and luxury, was in his prime a 
soldier of great ability, and he soon broke 
the power of Mithradates, who immediately 
fled for refuge to Tigranes. This made it 



THE REVOLUTION: ACT II 165 

absolutely necessary to deal with that king 
also; and Lucullus invaded Armenia and 
captured the king's new capital, Tigrano- 
certa. Unluckily, he had not that supreme 
gift of a great commander which enables 
him, as it afterwards enabled Csesar, to 
lead his men where and when he will; the 
army mutinied, refusing to go farther into 
the wild Armenian mountains, the most 
distant and formidable region a Roman army 
had as yet penetrated. Lucullus had to 
retreat. 

Then, under pressure from the men of 
business who were losing money by the 
instability of Roman dominion in Asia, 
Senate and people agreed to supersede 
Lucullus by a younger man, reckoned the 
best soldier of the day, and a military pupil 
of Sulla. This was the famous Gnaeus 
Pompeius, known to us familiarly as Pompey. 
In 67 he had been commissioned to clear the 
sea of pirates, and did it effectually. Now, 
with a combination of civil and military 
power such as no Roman had yet enjoyed, 
he took over Lucullus's army, made short 
work of Mithradates, and utterly broke up 
the empire of Tigranes. He overran Syria, 



166 ROME 

the region between the Mediterranean and the 
desert stretching to the Euphrates, pene- 
trated to Judaea and took Jersualem. This 
famous event is the first in the long and sad 
story of the relations of Rome with Judaea. 
At Jericho, before he reached the holy city, 
he received the dispatch which told him of 
the death of Mithradates, the removal from 
the scene of one who had been for thirty 
years Rome's most dangerous enemy. 

The result of the efforts of Lucullus and 
Pompey was the establishment of a frontier 
system in the East which may be said to have 
held good for the rest of Roman history. 
The principle of it is not easy to explain; 
but if the reader will take a map and trace 
the river Euphrates from its sources in west- 
ern Armenia to the Arabian desert, and then 
make it clear to himself that all within that 
line was to be either Roman or under Roman 
suzerainty, he will be able to form some idea 
of its importance in history. There were 
to be three new Roman provinces: Pontus 
with Bithynia in the north of Asia Minor, 
Cilicia on its south-eastern coast, and Syria, 
the coast region from Cilicia southwards to 
the frontier of Egypt. But between these 



THE REVOLUTION: ACT II 167 

and the Euphrates there were two kingdoms, 
Cappadocia and Galatia, and other smaller 
ones, which formed a Roman sphere of influ- 
ence where Rome herself could not as yet be 
constantly present. Imperfect as this sys- 
tem seems, it was quite strong enough to 
spread the prestige of the Roman Empire far 
and wide in the East, and the great king of 
Parthia, beyond the Euphrates, might well 
begin to be alarmed for his own safety. 

Now in settling this frontier system Pom- 
pey had, of course, to attend to an infinite 
number of details, and to make decisions, 
convey privileges, negotiate treaties, and 
grant charters, in dealing with those cities 
new and old which formed a most important 
part of his plan of settlement and defence. 
All this had to be done on his own responsi- 
bility, but would need the sanction of the 
Senate to be recognised as legally valid. 
When he returned home in 62 B.C. he expected 
that the Senate would give this sanction, 
especially as he had just disbanded his 
army, with which he might, if he had chosen, 
have enforced his claims. But the Senatorial 
government was reduced to such a state of 
imbecility that the majority would have 



168 ROME 

nothing to do with Pompey's invaluable 
work: they were jealous, they were lazy, and, 
above all, they were ignorant. So he had to 
fall back after a year or two on the consul 
of 59, C. Julius Caesar, who undertook to get 
the necessary sanction from the people if 
not from the Senate. In return Pompey was 
to help him to get a long command in Gaul, 
so that the work of frontier defence there 
begun by Marius might be resumed and 
completed. At this very moment a German 
people, the Suebi, whose name still survives 
in the modern Swabia, were threatening the 
rich plains of what is now eastern France: 
and then, just as a peace had been patched 
up with them, a Gallic tribe, the Helvetii, 
suddenly issuing from its home in (modern) 
Switzerland in search of new settlements, or 
pressed on by other tribes beyond it, was 
about to break into the Roman province of 
Transalpine Gaul. But Caesar had now done 
his part by Pompey, though not, indeed, with- 
out straining the constitution; and moving 
with the wonderful swiftness that after- 
wards became characteristic of him as a gen- 
eral, he reached Geneva just in time to stop 
them, and soon afterwards beat them in a 



THE REVOLUTION: ACT II 169 

great battle and forced them back to their 
homes. 

This was the beginning of a career of con- 
quest which made the glorious country we 
know as France into the most valuable part 
of the Roman Empire, and later on into 
the most compact and gifted nationality in 
Europe. What motives inspired Caesar in all 
he did during the nine years he spent there 
we need not ask, for we can only guess the 
answer; though he has left us his own story 
of his campaigns in simple straightforward 
Latin, he has not chosen to tell us what was 
all along at the back of his mind. Ambition, 
says the superficial historian; the desire to 
make himself in due time tyrant of Rome 
and the Empire. But we may take it as cer- 
tain that Caesar, a man whose health was 
never strong, would not have exposed him- 
self to constant peril of his life for nine suc- 
cessive years had he really all the time been 
nursing a secret ambition which death or 
serious illness might at any time destroy. 
What he really seems to have loved, like 
C. Gracchus, was work — steady, hard work 
with no one to hinder him, and with a definite 
practical object before him. Doubtless fur- 



170 ROME 

ther hopes or fears were in his mind, but this 
great practical genius, with an intellect char- 
acteristically Roman, 1 though more scien- 
tific in its tendency than that of any other 
Roman known to us, was always bent on the 
work immediately in front of him, and never 
rested till it was completed to his satisfaction. 
When Csesar hurried up to check the Hel- 
vetii in 58 B.C. there was but one Roman 
province in Gaul, the south-eastern part of 
modern France (which still teems with Roman 
remains and inscriptions), together with a 
considerable district to the west of it at the 
foot of the Pyrenees. When he finally left 
Gaul at the end of 50, the whole of modern 
France and Belgium had been added to the 
Empire, though not as yet organised into 
provinces. He did not take long to reach 
our Channel and to subdue the tribes on the 
coast; he began the written history of our 
island by invading it twice, and recording 
such information as he could gain about its 
geography and inhabitants. He crossed the 
Rhine into Germany by a bridge constructed 
for him by his engineers: and the method of 
building this bridge survives in his book to 

1 He came of an old Roman patrician family. 



THE REVOLUTION: ACT II 171 

puzzle the ingenuity of scholars as well as 
school-boys. The Gauls were doubtless 
amazed at these performances, as he meant 
them to be; and, after one heroic effort to 
save themselves from becoming an appen- 
dage of a Mediterranean empire, they had to 
submit. While we can feel with these noble 
efforts for freedom, or blame Caesar for what 
sometimes seems unnecessary cruelty, we 
must remember that from this time forward 
the country from the Rhine to the ocean be- 
comes a great factor in European civilisation. 
There was still, indeed, a gap in the line of 
frontier; how was the eastern end of the Alps 
to be protected from invasion? There, as 
we saw, the great rampart was lowest, and 
beyond it the barbarians were an unknown 
quantity. Here the river Danube eventually 
became the frontier, and was carefully con- 
nected with that of the Rhine; but this 
completion of the great work had to wait for 
half-a-century, and in the meantime luckily 
no inroad was made or threatened. It was 
Tiberius, afterwards emperor, another great 
soldier, with an army almost as devoted to its 
general as that of Csesar, who after long 
steady effort planted the Roman power 



172 ROME 

firmly in this region. From a military point 
of view the Roman Empire, and therefore 
Western civilisation as a whole, owed its 
very existence for centuries to Pompey, 
Caesar and Tiberius, with their splendidly 
trained armies and their skilful engineers. 

All this work of conquest and settlement 
was not the work of the State, or due to the 
old civic sense of duty and discipline; it was 
the work of the armies, due to their good 
discipline, and to their loyalty to their leaders. 
This being so, it was of course only natural 
that the armies and their leaders should 
claim to control the action and policy of an 
enfeebled State, as Sulla had already claimed 
it., This is really, put in a very few words, 
the secret of the Roman imperial system that 
was to come; so, too, in England, in Crom- 
well's time, the State passed into the hands 
of the army, because that army (though in 
our case but for a short time) represented the 
best instincts and purposes of the nation. 
But the question of the moment was whether 
the commander of one of these Roman 
armies could so identify himself and his 
soldiers with the State and its true interests, 
as to become the means of establishing 



THE REVOLUTION: ACT II 178 

a sound and efficient government for the 
Mediterranean world. Sulla had failed so 
to identify himself: he had neither knowl- 
edge enough nor sympathy enough. The 
chance had been open to Pompey when he 
returned from the East in 62, but he had dis- 
banded his army and declined it; he was in 
many ways a valuable man, but he was not 
the stuff that real statesmen are made of. 
After the long war in Gaul the chance was 
open to Caesar, and he accepted it without 
hesitation. 

He accepted it, but in truth he had to 
fight for it. For years his operations in 
Gaul had been looked on at Rome with sus- 
picion, especially by a clique of personal 
enemies led by the famous Cato, a descendant 
of the old Cato whom we met in the previous 
century. These men looked on Csesar as dan- 
gerous to the State — and dangerous indeed 
he was, to that old form of State which neither 
they nor he could make vigorous and efficient. 
They clung to the worn-out machinery of 
the constitution, to the checks, the vetoes, 
the short tenure of office, to the exclusive 
right of the Senate to deal with the ever- 
increasing administrative business of the 



174 ROME 

Empire. Knowing, or guessing, that Caesar, 
like Gaius Gracchus, would force his personal 
will on the State if he judged it necessary, 
they were determined to prevent his becoming 
a political power, and they brought Pompey 
to the same view, and armed him with mili- 
tary force to be used against Caesar — against 
the man, that is, who had spent the best years 
of his life in indefatigable work for the Empire 
and civilisation. The result was civil war 
once more; civil war that might unquestion- 
ably have been averted by a wider outlook, 
a more generous feeling, a spirit of com- 
promise, on the part of the high aristocrats 
who, like Cato, believed themselves to be 
struggling for liberty. The liberty they were 
struggling for was in reality the liberty to 
misgovern the Empire, and to talk without 
acting efficiently. 

It is plain, as we may learn from the abun- 
dant correspondence of the time, 1 that they 
did not know the man they had to deal with. 
Caesar took them completely by surprise; 
in a few weeks he had cleared Pompey and 
Senate and their army out of Italy, had pro- 
vided for the government, and gone off to 

1 See below, p. 184. 



THE REVOLUTION: ACT II 175 

Spain to secure the West by turning the 
Pompeian armies out of that peninsula also. 
After a brilliant campaign of six weeks, 
admirably described by himself in his work 
on the Civil War, he forced those armies to 
surrender and then let them go, as he had done 
just before in Italy. His clemency took the 
world by surprise as much as his generalship. 
But the worst was not over for him. Pom- 
pey was gathering all the resources of the 
East against him, and concentrating them 
in Epirus with a view to the re-conquest of 
Italy. Again Caesar's rapidity saved him; 
he was just in time to strike the first blow 
by crossing the sea from Brindisi — a rash ex- 
pedient — and hampering Pompey before his 
concentration was effected. Here, however, 
in his eagerness to bring the campaign to an 
issue, he made a serious blunder, and had to 
pay for it by defeat and a retreat to the corn- 
growing plain of Thessaly. Pompey unwisely 
followed him, instead of invading Italy; and 
here, in August 48, was utterly beaten at the 
battle of Pharsalia. The worn-out old soldier 
fled to Egypt, where he was treacherously 
murdered by one of the king's generals. He 
was an estimable man with many excellent 



176 ROME 

qualities, and in a more tranquil age might 
have well become what Cicero wished to make 
him, the presiding genius of the Roman State. 

Caesar had yet much war before him — war 
in Egypt, in Asia Minor, in Africa and in 
Spain, against the supporters of the old 
regime, for nothing he could do in the way of 
conciliation would persuade them to forgive 
him the crime of seeking to identify himself 
with the State. In doing so they deprived 
him of the time which he might have spent 
to far better purpose at Rome on the work 
of efficient government. As it was, he had 
been able to spend but a few months in all 
at home, when on March 15, 44 B.C., he was 
murdered at a meeting of the Senate, at the 
feet of Pompey's statue, by a small group 
of assassins, some of whom were intimate 
friends of his own. They thought he was on 
the point of assuming a visible despotism, 
and they had some justification for the sus- 
picion, though it was probably a delusion. 
To kill a tyrant, they thought, was to do a 
noble work in true old Roman fashion. So 
did the murderers of the Gracchi. 

From what little we know about such work 
of reform as Caesar had time f or, we may take 



THE REVOLUTION: ACT II 177 

it as certain that these deluded assassins 
made a sad blunder. Csesar's legislative 
work was fragmentary, but every item of it 
shows intelligence and political insight. He 
did not attempt to turn out a new constitu- 
tion in black and white; he did the work of 
government mainly himself for the time 
being, and we do not know how he meant to 
provide for it after his death. In the most 
important matter of all, the adjustment of 
the Empire to the home government, and 
especially the subordination of the provincial 
governors to a central authority, he fore- 
stalled the imperial system of the future: he 
made himself the central authority, to whom 
the governors were to be responsible. The 
other most important question of govern- 
ment, that of the power and composition of 
the Senate, he answered by raising the num- 
ber of Senators to 900, as Gaius Gracchus 
had wished to do, and thus destroying the 
power of the old narrow oligarchical cliques. 
But perhaps his practical wisdom is best seen 
in his economic legislation for Rome and 
Italy. He was the first statesman to try and 
check the over-abundance of slave-labour; 
the first, too, to lay the foundation of a 



178 ROME 

reasonable bankruptcy law. He regulated 
the corn-supply in the city, and brought down 
the number of recipients of corn-doles to less 
than one-half of what it had lately been. 
Again, he laid down general rules for the 
qualification of candidates for municipal 
office in Italy, and arranged for the taking of 
a census in all the cities every five years, the 
records of which were to be deposited at 
Rome. It would seem as if he meant to work 
out the enfranchisement of Italy to its 
natural conclusion: for he not only com- 
pleted it by extending it to the Alps, which 
had never yet been done, but went beyond 
the bounds of Italy, offering the citizenship 
freely both to Gauls and Sicilians. 

Attempts have been made to depict Caesar 
as almost more than human; and of late 
again there has been a reaction against him 
of no less absurdity, holding him up to con- 
tempt as a weak but lucky opportunist. 
As we have his own military writings, a life 
by Plutarch, a few letters written by or 
addressed to him, and innumerable allusions 
to him in contemporary literature, we ought 
to be able to form some just idea of him. As 
one who has been familiar with all these 



THE REVOLUTION: ACT II 179 

materials, and many others of less value, 
during the greater part of a lifetime, I say 
without hesitation that Caesar was the one 
man of his time really gifted with scientific 
intelligence — with the power of seeing the facts 
before him and adjusting his action to them. 
This intelligence, combined with great 
strength of will, made him master of the 
Roman Empire; and though his character 
was by no means perfect, he seems to have 
used his mastership, not like a capricious 
Oriental despot, but with a real sense of 
responsibility. A man who combines the 
qualities of an intelligent statesman in bad 
times with a generous temper, good taste 
and good scholarship, surely deserves to be 
thought of as one altogether out of the 
common. In Shakespeare's picture of him, 
derived from Plutarch's biography, and repre- 
senting only the last two days of his life, 
he seems weak in body and overweening in 
spirit, and is probably meant to seem so by 
the dramatist for his own purposes. But 
no sooner have the murderers done with him 
than the true greatness of the man begins 
to make itself felt, and is impressed on us 
in page after page to the end of the play, of 



180 ROME 

which the action may be said to be pivoted 
on the idea of the horror and the uselessness 
of their deed. 

So far in this chapter and the last I have 
been treating of this age as one of action. 
It is indeed filled full of human activity, in 
spite of the laziness of the governing class as 
a whole. But this activity was shown not 
only in war and politics; this is also an age 
of great poets and real men of letters. I 
must say a word about the two greatest 
poets, Lucretius and Catullus; but among the 
men of letters there stands out one far above 
the rest whose life and genius it would take 
a long chapter to explain. Cicero's pre- 
eminence is not easy to understand even after 
long study of his voluminous works: yet I 
must try to make it clear that he was, in 
fact, one of the greatest of all Romans. 

Of Lucretius it is our fate to know nothing 
except his poem in six books on "The Nature 
of Things." But his name is Roman, and 
the poem has the true Roman characteristic 
of being essentially practical in its object. 
That object will seem a singular one to those 
who are unacquainted with the Greek and 



THE REVOLUTION: ACT II 181 

Roman culture of this age. What roused 
a poet's passion in this man's mind was simply 
the desire to free others, as he had freed him- 
self, from the fetters of superstition, or, as 
he calls it, religion; to make them abandon 
the delusive dream of a life after death, to 
repudiate the old stories of torment in Hades, 
and all foolish legends of the gods, who in 
his view took no interest whatever in human 
life. All this was, of course, derived from 
Greek philosophy, the doctrine of the Epi- 
curean school, but no Greek had ever put 
such passion into a creed as Lucretius. His 
poetry at times almost reminds us of the 
grandeur and authority of the Hebrew proph- 
ets, so ardently did he believe in his own 
creed, and in his mission to enforce it on 
others. Uncouth and dry as much of it is — 
for he has to explain that Epicurean theory 
of the universe known still to science as the 
atomic theory — he breaks out now and again 
into strains of magnificent verse which reveal 
a mind all burning within. Here is a speci- 
men: it must be in prose, for no verse trans- 
lation seems adequate — 



a 



What hast thou, O mortal, so much at 



182 ROME 

heart, that thou goest such lengths in sickly 
sorrows? Why bemoan and bewail death? 
for say that thy life past and gone has been 
welcome to thee, and that thy blessings have 
not all, as if they were poured into a sieve, 
run through and been lost without avail: 
why not then take thy departure like a guest 
filled with life, and with resignation, thou 
fool, enter upon untroubled rest? But if all 
that thou hast enjoyed has been squandered 
and lost, and if life is a grievance, why seek 
to make any addition, . . . why not rather 
make an end of life and travail? for there 
is nothing which I can contrive or discover 
for thee to give pleasure: all things are ever 
the same" (iii. 933 foil.). 

The other poet, Catullus, was not of Roman 
birth, but, like so many literary men of this 
and the following age, an Italian from the 
basin of the Po. He had no practical aim 
in writing poetry: he simply wrote because 
he could not help it, about himself and his 
friends and his loves. It was his own self 
that inspired him chiefly, and it is still himself 
that interests us. According to his own 
mood, now fresh with the happiness of an 



THE REVOLUTION: ACT II 183 

artist, now darkened by anger or self-indul- 
gence, his poems are exquisite or repulsive; 
but they are always true and honest lyrics, 
and interesting because they are so full of 
life and passion. Catullus is one of the 
world's best lyric poets. Here is one of his 
gems — 



a 



Is aught of pleasure, aught of solace sweet 
Permitted, Calvus, to the silent grave, 

What time the tale of sorrow we repeat, 
Yearning o'er memories we fain would 



save 



P 



Know this. From Love and Friendship if 
a tear 
Can make its way into that silentness, 
Quintilia feels untimely Death less drear, 
For hearing of the love that still can 
bless." 

Catullus, xcvi. (by S. T. L). 

Lastly, we come to the man of letters who 
has given his name to this period of literature, 
which indeed draws more than half its inter- 
est from him and from his works. Marcus 
Tullius Cicero was an Italian, and had little 



184 ROME 

of the Roman character in his make; he 
came from the town of Arpinum, among the 
foothills of the Apennines some sixty miles 
south-east of Rome. He made his way into 
Roman society by his social and conversa- 
tional powers, and by his capacity for friend- 
ship, and into the field of politics by his great 
gift of oratory, which was now indispensable 
for public men. As a "new man" he never 
was really at home with the high aristocracy, 
but he was a man of many friends for all 
that, and reckoned among them all the great 
men of his time, including both Csesar and 
Pompey. His best and truest friend, who 
worked for him all his life with unsparing 
care, was a man of business who stood out- 
side of politics, Pomponius Atticus; and of 
Cicero's letters to this faithful friend and 
adviser nearly four hundred survive to prove 
the reality of that lifelong devotion. Some 
five hundred letters to and from other cor- 
respondents are also extant, and the whole 
collection forms the most fascinating record 
of a great man's life and thoughts that has 
come down to us from classical antiquity. 

Since Mommsen wrote his famous History 
of Rome, in which he was almost ignored, 



THE REVOLUTION: ACT II 185 

Cicero has often been treated with contempt 
as a shallow thinker, deriving all his inspira- 
tion from Greek originals, and as a feeble 
statesman, brilliant only as an orator. It 
is true that there is a want of grit in much 
that Cicero wrote : he was the child of his age, 
never tired of writing and talking, little used 
to profound thinking, and rarely acting with 
independent vigour. But he has two claims 
on the gratitude of posterity which should 
never be forgotten. First, he made Latin 
into the most perfect language of prose that 
the world as yet has known. The echoes of 
his beautiful style can be heard centuries 
afterwards in the Latin fathers of Christian- 
ity, especially St. Augustine and Lactantius, 
and they are still audible in the best French 
and Italian prose-writers of to-day. Sec- 
ondly, of all Romans Cicero is the one best 
known to us as an individual human being: 
and few indeed who have had the chance to 
become really familiar with him can fail to 
love him as his own friends loved him. He 
was not the stuff of which strong statesmen 
are made; he was too dependent on the sup- 
port and approval of others to inspire men 
with zeal for a cause — especially for a losing 



186 ROME 

cause. His own consulship was brilliant, for 
he was able to combine the best elements in 
the State in the cause of order as against 
anarchy — anarchy which threatened the very 
existence of Rome as a city; and at the end 
of his life he showed the same ability to use 
a strong combination to good purpose in the 
political field. But he was not of such strong 
growth as to mark out a line of his own, and 
at some unhappy moments of his life his 
weakness is apt to move our pity, if not our 
contempt. 

But with all his weak points Cicero is one 
of the best and greatest of all Romans. His 
gifts were rich, and he used them well. We 
know him as a man of pure life in an impure 
age, and as one who never used his gifts or 
opportunities to do harm to others, whether 
political enemies or helpless provincials. We 
know him, too, as a faithful husband and a 
devoted father. And lastly, we know that 
he was not lacking in courage when the assas- 
sin overtook him — the last of a long list of 
great men of that age to die a violent death. 



CHAPTER VIII 

AUGUSTUS — THE REVIVAL OF THE ROMAN 

SPIRIT 

The death of Julius Caesar seemed to 
plunge the world once more into darkness. 
We have evidence enough of the general feel- 
ing of horror and despair, — a despair hard to 
realise in our days, when settled and orderly 
government saves us from all serious anxiety 
about our lives and property. Power fell into 
the hands of a far more unscrupulous man 
than Csesar, the Mark Antony of Shake- 
speare's play; but he had a rival in Caesar's 
nephew and adopted son, afterwards known 
as Augustus. Civil war, of course, followed: 
first, war between these two and the mur- 
derers of Julius, and then war between the 
two victors. Antony, who had in a division 
of the Empire taken the eastern half, and 
married Cleopatra, the beautiful queen of 
Egypt, was crushed at the naval battle of 
Actium: the Empire became once more 

187 



188 ROME 

united, and hope began to spring up 
afresh. 

Instead of following the melancholy history 
of these years (44 to 31 B.C.) let us try to 
realise the need of a complete change in men's 
minds and in the ways of government, if the 
Roman Empire was to be preserved, and 
Mediterranean civilisation with it. We can 
best do this by learning something of the two 
men who more than all others brought about 
the change: Virgil, the greatest of Roman 
poets, and Augustus, the most fortunate and 
discerning of Roman statesmen. Augustus 
began a new system of government, based, no 
doubt, on the ideas of Julius, which lasted, 
gradually developing itself, till the fifth cen- 
tury of our era. Virgil, the poet of the new 
Roman spirit, kept that spirit alive into the 
Middle Ages, and rightly read, he keeps it 
still before us. 

If Virgil had lived in an ordinary age, when 
the flow of events was smooth and unruffled, 
he might have been a great poet, but hardly 
one of the world's greatest. But he lived in 
a crisis of the history of civilisation, and he 
was called to do his part in it. For a century 
before he wrote, the one great fact in the 



REVIVAL OF ROMAN SPIRIT 189 

world was the marvellous growth of the 
Roman dominion. When he was born, 
seventy years before the Christian era, Rome 
was the only great civilised power left, and 
a few years later it looked as if she had not 
even a barbarian rival to menace her, except 
the Parthians far away in the East. The 
Roman was everywhere, fighting, trading, rul- 
ing; nothing of importance could be done with- 
out the thought — What will Rome say to it? 

Yet just as Virgil was growing to manhood 
it became obvious, as we have seen, that this 
great power was in reality on the verge of 
breaking up. She had abandoned justice 
and duty, and given herself to greed and 
pleasure. Her government was rapacious: 
she was sucking the life-blood of the nations. 
She had lost her old virtues of self-sacrifice, 
purity of family life, reverence for the divine. 
The rulers of the world had lost the sense of 
duty and discipline; they were divided into 
jarring political factions, and had felt the 
bitterness of civil war, in which men killed 
each other in cold blood almost for the sake 
of killing. But with Julius Caesar's strong 
hand and generous temper it must have 
seemed to many that a better time was com- 



190 ROME 

ing, and among these was the young poet 
from Mantua under the rampart of the Alps. 
No one who knows Virgil's poems well 
can have any doubt that all his hopes for 
himself and his family, for Italy and the 
Empire, were bound up with the family of the 
Caesars. The sub-alpine region in which he 
was born and bred had been for ten years of 
his boyhood and youth under the personal 
rule of the great Julius, and had supplied him 
with the flower of that famous army that had 
conquered first Gaul and then the world. It 
is possible that the poet owed his position 
as a Roman citizen to the enlightened policy 
of Caesar. Even now we cannot read without 
a thrill of horror the splendid lines in which 
he records the eclipse of the sun and the 
mourning of all nature when the great man 
was murdered by so-called patriots. 1 With 
such patriots, with the rapacious republican 
oligarchy, he could have had no sympathy, 
and there is not a trace of it in his poems. 
When, during the civil wars that followed the 
murder, he was turned out of his ancestral 
farm near Mantua to make room for veteran 
soldiers, he owed the recovery of it to the 

1 Georgics I, 463 foil. 



REVIVAL OF ROMAN SPIRIT 191 

master of those soldiers, the second Caesar, 
whom henceforward he regarded not only as 
his own protector and friend, but as the one 
hope of the Empire. 

Now this younger Caesar, nephew and 
adopted son of Julius, though not a great 
soldier or a hero in any sense, was yet one of 
those rare men who learn wisdom in adversity, 
and use it to overcome passion and violence 
in themselves and others. He came gradually 
to see that Italy and the world could not be 
rescued from misery and despair by war and 
strong government alone. He grasped the 
fact, which Sulla had missed, that the one 
thing wanting was loyalty — loyalty to him- 
self and belief in his mission : loyalty to Rome 
and Italy, and belief in their mission in the 
world. Confidence in him, and in the destiny 
of Rome, might create in men's minds a 
hope for the future, a new self-respect, almost 
a new faith. Divided and depressed as they 
were, he wanted to set new ideals before 
them, and to get them to help him loyally 
towards the realisation of those ideals. 
Economically, morally, religiously, Italy was 
to rise to new life in an era of peace and 
justice. 



192 ROME 

This may seem too grand an ideal for a man 
like Augustus Caesar, who (as I have said) 
was no hero, and who certainly was no phil- 
osopher. But it is none the less true that he 
understood that "peace hath her victories 
no less renowned than war": and that his 
own conviction, based, perhaps, on shrewd 
political reasonings, inspired his poets and 
historians to hail a new age of peace and 
prosperity. In one way or another they all 
fell in with his ideas. Their themes are the 
glory and beauty of Italy, the greatness of 
Rome, the divine power which had given her 
the right to rule the world, and the story of 
the way in which she had come to exercise 
that right. But as Virgil is the greatest fig- 
ure in the group, so is his Mneid the greatest 
work in which those ideas are immortalised. 
The Roman Empire has vanished, the ancient 
city, which rose in fresh magnificence under 
Augustus, has crumbled away; but the 
Mneid remains the one enduring monument 
of that age of new hope. 

It is said that Augustus himself suggested 
to the poet the subject of the Mneid. If so, 
it was characteristic of a man who used every 
chance of extending his own fame and influ- 



REVIVAL OF ROMAN SPIRIT 193 

ence without forcing them on the attention 
of his people. If a poem was to be written on 
the great theme of the revival of Rome and 
Italy, Augustus himself could not of course 
be the hero of it, nor even Julius: political 
and artistic feeling alike forbade. But a 
hero it must have, and he must be placed, not 
in the burning light of the politics of the day, 
but in the dim distance of the past. Such a 
hero was found in the mythical ancestor of 
the Julian family, iEneas, son of Venus and 
Anchises. A legend, familiar to educated 
Romans, told how this Trojan hero, whose 
personality appears in Homer, wandered over 
the seas after the fall of Troy, and landed at 
last in Italy; how he subdued the wild tribes 
then dwelling in Latium, brought peace and 
order and civilisation, and was under the 
hand of destiny the founder of the great 
career of Rome. His son lulus, whose name 
the Julii believed themselves to bear, was 
in the legend the founder of the city from 
which Rome herself was founded; and thus 
the family of the Caesars, the rescue of Italy 
from barbarism, and the foundation of the 
Eternal City, might all be brought into con- 
nexion with the story of iEneas the Trojan. 



194 ROME 

Here, then, was the hero, the type of which 
the antitype was to be found in Augustus. 

And this is how the Mneid became a great 
national and a great imperial poem. It 
created a national hero, and endowed him 
with the best characteristics of his race, and 
especially with that sense of duty which the 
Romans called pietas: this is why it became 
a great national poem. It connected him 
with the famous stories of Greece and of 
Troy, and made him prophetically the ances- 
tor of the man who was rescuing the Empire 
from ruin: this is why it became a great im- 
perial poem. The idea was a noble one, and 
Virgil rose to his subject. Though the Mneid 
has drawbacks which for a modern reader de- 
tract from the general effect, yet whenever 
the poet comes upon his great theme the tone 
is that of a full organ. Even in a translation, 
though he cannot feel the witchery of Virgil's 
magic touch, the reader may recognise and 
welcome the recurrence of that great theme, 
and so learn how its treatment made the poem 
the world's second great epic. It instantly 
took a firm hold on the Roman mind; it 
came to be looked on almost as a sacred book, 
loved and honoured as much by Christian 



REVIVAL OF ROMAN SPIRIT 195 

Fathers as by pagan scholars. Italy has 
given the world two of the greatest poems 
ever written: the Mneid of Virgil, and the 
Divina Commedia of Dante, in which the 
younger poet took the imaginary figure of his 
predecessor as his guide and teacher in his 
travel through the scenes of the nether world. 

But we must now leave poetry for fact and 
action, and try to gain some idea of that work 
of Augustus which laid the solid foundation 
of a new imperial system; a system of which 
we moderns not only see the relics still around 
us, but feel unconsciously the influence in 
many ways. Augustus had found time to 
discover, since the death of Julius, that the 
work to be done would fall mainly into two 
great departments: (1) Rome and Italy 
must be loyal, contented, and at peace; 
(2) the rest of the Empire must be governed 
justly and efficiently. To this we must add 
that the whole must contribute, each part in 
due proportion, to its own defence and govern- 
ment, both by paying taxes and by military 
service. 

1. The city of Rome, with a population 
of perhaps half a million, of all races and 



196 ROME 

degrees, had been a constant anxiety to 
Augustus so far, and had exercised far more 
power in the Empire than such a mixed and 
idle population was entitled to. He saw that 
this population must be well policed, and 
induced to keep itself in order as far as pos- 
sible; that it must be made quite comfortable, 
run no risk of starvation, have confidence in 
the good-will of its gods, and enjoy plenty of 
amusement. Above all, it must believe in 
himself, in order to be loyal to his policy. 
When he returned to Rome after crushing 
Antony and Cleopatra, the Romans were 
already disposed to believe in him, and he did 
all he could to make them permanently and 
freely loyal. He divided the city into new 
sections for police purposes, and recruited 
corps of "watchmen" from the free popula- 
tion; he restored temples and priesthoods, 
erected many pleasant and convenient public 
buildings (thus incidentally giving plenty of 
employment), organised the supply of corn 
and of water, and encouraged public amuse- 
ments by his own presence at them. He 
took care that no one should starve, or be- 
come so uncomfortable as to murmur or 
rebel. 



REVIVAL OP ROMAN SPIRIT 197 

But, on the other hand, he did not mean 
this motley population to continue to have 
undue influence on the affairs of the Empire. 
True, he gave them back their Free State (res- 
publica), and you might see magistrates, Sen- 
ate, and assemblies in the city, just as under 
the Republic. But the people of the city 
had henceforth little political power. The 
consuls and Senate were indeed far from idle, 
but the assemblies for election and legislation 
soon ceased to be realities. In elections no 
money was now to be gained by a vote, and 
in legislation the "people" were quite con- 
tent with sanctioning the wisdom of Augus- 
tus and his advisers. At the beginning of 
the next reign it was possible to put nearly 
the whole of this business into the hands 
of the Senate, and the Roman people made 
no objection. Seeing that they were only 
a fraction of the free population of the 
Empire, it was as well that this should be 
so; the rest of the citizen body could not 
use their votes at a distance from Rome, 
and the Senate and the princeps 1 (as 
Augustus and his immediate successors 
were called) represented the interests of 

1 See below, p. 206. 



198 ROME 

the Empire far better than the crowd of 
voters. 

Of the work of Augustus in Italy we un- 
luckily know very little, but what we do 
know shows that he worked on much the same 
principles as in the city. Italy was made 
safe and comfortable, and was now free from 
all warlike disturbance for a long period. 
Brigandage was suppressed: roads were 
repaired: agriculture and country life were 
encouraged in all possible ways. A book on 
agriculture written even in Augustus's earlier 
years boasts of the prosperity of rural Italy, 
and Virgil's poem on husbandry is full of the 
love and praise of Italian life and scenery. 
Here is a specimen — 



a 



But no, not Medeland with its wealth of 

woods, 
Fair Ganges, Hermus thick with golden silt, 
Can match the praise of Italy . . . 
Here blooms perpetual spring, and summer 

here 
In months that are not summer's; twice 

teem the flocks: 
Twice does the tree yield service of her 

fruit. 



REVIVAL OF ROMAN SPIRIT 199 

• •••••• 

Mark too her cities, so many and so proud, 
Of mighty toil the achievement, town on 

town 
Up rugged precipices heaved and reared, 
And rivers gliding under ancient walls." * 

2. The peaceful state of Rome and Italy 
made it possible for Augustus to undertake, in 
person to a great extent, the more important 
work of organising the rest of the Empire. He 
found it in a state of chaos almost as great as 
that of the Turkish Empire in our own time. 
He left it a strongly compacted union of 
provinces and dependent kingdoms grouped 
around the Mediterranean, which for a long 
time to come served two valuable purposes. 
First, it protected Mediterranean civilisation 
against barbarian attack, the most valuable 
thing done for us (as I said in my first chap- 
ter) by Roman organisation. Secondly, it 
gave free opportunity for the growth of that 
enlightened system of law which has been the 
other chief gift of Rome to modern civilisa- 
tion. And also, though without any purpose 
on the part of the government — nay, in spite 

1 From Mr. James Rhoades's version. 



200 ROME 

of its strenuous opposition — it made possible 
the rapid growth of Christianity, during the 
next half -century, which seized on the great 
towns and the main lines of communication 
to spread itself among the masses of the 
people. 

Augustus was able to do all this work 
beyond Italy quite legally, and as a servant 
of the State. He had succeeded in identify- 
ing himself, his family, and all his interests, 
with the State and its interests, in a way of 
which Sulla had never dreamt, and which had 
not been possible for Julius Caesar. When he 
restored the Free State he divided the work 
of government with the Senate and the 
magistrates, and in this division he took care 
that the whole range of what we should call 
imperial and foreign affairs should fall to 
himself, with the sole command of the army. 
Thus he became supreme ruler of all provinces 
on or near the frontiers, appointed their 
governors, and kept them responsible to 
himself. If there was war on a frontier, it 
was carried through by his lieutenants, under 
his imperium and his auspices. For a gov- 
ernor to wage war on his own account was 
no longer possible, for it was made high 



REVIVAL OF ROMAN SPIRIT 201 

treason under a new and stringent law. The 
safety of the Empire, and especially of the 
frontier provinces, depended on the army, and 
the army was now identified once more in 
interest through Augustus with the State. 
But of course a system like this would not 
work of itself; it needed constant looking 
after. Augustus knew this well, and knew 
also that he could not by himself either set 
it going or continue to look after it. It was 
part of his good fortune that he found a 
really capable and loyal helper in Agrippa, 
a tried soldier and organiser, who till his 
death in 12 B.C., during the most prosperous 
years of Augustus's power, was able to iden- 
tify his own interests with those of his friend 
and the State. The two worked admirably 
together, and between them found time to 
travel over the whole Empire, working hard 
at settlements of all kinds, and conducting 
military operations where they were abso- 
lutely necessary. It was the same kind of 
work, but on a far larger scale, as that of 
Pompeius after his conquests in the East: 
founding new cities, and settling the status 
of old ones: making treaties with kings 
and chieftains: arranging the details of 



202 ROME 

finance, land-tenure, and so on. Let us 
notice two important points in all this 
work of organisation, which will help to 
show how greatly in earnest Augustus was 
in his task of welding the Empire into 
real unity, and ruling it on rational prin- 
ciples. 

First, he instituted for the first time 
(though Julius is said to have contemplated 
it) a complete survey, or census as the Romans 
called it, of all the material resources of the 
Empire, in order to ascertain what taxes all 
its free inhabitants ought to pay for purposes 
of government. Under the Republic there 
had never been such a survey, and the result 
was that abundant opportunity had been 
found for unfair taxation, and for extortion 
by corrupt officials. Now every house, field, 
and wood was duly valued by responsible 
officials, so that unjust exactions could be 
easily detected. By accurate keeping of 
accounts the government was able to tell 
what sums it ought to receive, and how much 
it had to spend; and we know that Augustus's 
foreign policy was greatly influenced by such 
financial considerations. He kept a kind of 
yearly balance-sheet himself, and his sue- 



REVIVAL OF ROMAN SPIRIT 203 

cessor found the affairs of the Empire in 
perfect order. 

Secondly, each province was now for the 
first time given a kind of corporate existence, 
and became something more than the military 
command of a Roman magistrate. A council 
of the province met once a year at its chief 
town, and transacted a certain amount of 
business. True, this did not give the province 
any measure of real self-government, but it 
had some useful results, and it is not impos- 
sible that Augustus may have intended that 
more should eventually follow. This meeting 
of a provincial council brought each province 
into direct touch with the home govern- 
ment, and in particular enabled it to make 
complaint of its governor if he had been 
unpopular and oppressive. And one most 
interesting feature of these councils was that 
they had a worship of their own, meant, no 
doubt, to dim the lustre of local and tribal 
worships, and to keep the idea of Rome 
and her rulers constantly before the minds 
of the provincials. For the divine objects 
of worship were Augustus himself or his 
Genius, in combination with the new goddess 
Roma. The most famous example of this 



204 ROME 

worship is found at Lugdunum, now Lyons, 
where there was an altar dedicated to Rome 
and Augustus, at the junction of Rhone and 
Saone, which served as a religious centre for 
the three provinces into which Augustus now 
divided the great area of the Gallic conquests 
of Julius. 

Though his object was undoubtedly peace, 
Augustus could not, of course, entirely escape 
war on his frontiers. He could not have 
finally settled the frontier on the line of the 
Danube, which was far the most valuable 
military work of his time, without wars which 
were both long and dangerous. It was abso- 
lutely necessary to cover Italy on the north- 
east, where the passes over the Alps are low 
and comparatively easy, and also to shield 
the Greek peninsula from attack by the wild 
tribes to the north of it. I have already 
alluded to the great work of Tiberius (the 
stepson of Augustus) in this quarter, which 
marks him as the third of the great generals 
who saved the civilisation of the Mediterra- 
nean for us. At one time Augustus thought 
of advancing the frontier from the Rhine to 
the Elbe, and so of connecting Elbe and 
Danube in one continuous line of defence. 



REVIVAL OF ROMAN SPIRIT 205 

But this plan made it necessary to enclose all 
Germany west of the Elbe in the Roman 
Empire, and it was soon found that the 
Germans were not to be made into Roman 
provincials without a prolonged struggle for 
which Augustus had neither money nor in- 
clination. So the frontier came back to 
the Rhine, and the Rhine and the sea 
marked the Roman frontier on north and 
west, until Claudius, the third successor 
of Augustus, added our island, or rather 
the southern part of it, to the Empire, in 
a.d. 43. 

In the East Augustus contrived to do with- 
out war, trusting, and rightly trusting, to the 
enormous prestige he had won by overcoming 
Antony and Cleopatra, and annexing the 
ancient kingdom of Egypt. His fame spread 
to India, and probably even to China, with 
the caravans of merchants who then as now 
passed along fixed routes from Syria and 
Egypt to the Far East. We Britons know 
what prestige can do among Orientals; it is a 
word that has often been in disfavour, but it 
means that there are ways of avoiding war 
without withdrawing just claims to influence. 
Augustus contrived on the strength of his 



206 ROME 

prestige to keep an honourable peace with 
the Parthians and Armenians who bordered 
on the Empire along the line of the Euphrates, 
and his successors would have kept it too had 
they always followed out his policy. Tiberius, 
his faithful pupil and successor, did follow 
out that policy, and showed consummate skill 
in handling it. 

The mention of Tiberius, who succeeded 
to the position of Augustus at the end of his 
long life, suggests a few words about a weak 
point in the new system, which was to give 
some trouble in the future. How was the 
succession to be effected? Augustus had not 
made a new constitution; he had only en- 
grafted his own position of authority on the 
old republican constitution. So at least he 
wished his position to be understood, and so 
he was careful to describe it in the record of 
his deeds which he left behind him, engraved 
on the walls of the great tomb which he built 
for himself and his family. In dignity and 
consequence he wished to be considered the 
first citizen; and this he expressed by the 
word Princeps, i.e. the first man in the State: 
by the name Augustus, which suggested to a 
Roman ear something in the nature of reli- 



REVIVAL OF ROMAN SPIRIT 207 

gious sanctity: by the honorary title pater 
patrice (father of his country), and in other 
ways. The real power in his hands had its 
basis and guarantee in the army, of which his 
imperium made him (as we should say) com- 
mander-in-chief; but the army was on the 
frontiers doing duty for the Empire, all but 
invisible to the Roman and Italian. Thus 
his imperium, though it might be legally used 
in Italy, was primarily a military power 
indispensable for the guardian of the fron- 
tiers. To the Italians it might well seem that 
the Free State was still maintained, and that 
no new permanent power had been estab- 
lished; though Greeks and foreigners might 
be, and indeed were, more discerning as to 
what had really happened. 

But when Augustus died, in a.d. 14, how 
was a succession to be effected? Or was there 
to be a succession at all — would it not be 
better to let the State pass back again into 
the hands of the Senate and people? This 
last was the only logical way, and it was the 
plan actually adopted in form. A position 
like that of Augustus could not pass to a 
successor, unless the State in its old consti- 
tutional form chose to appoint such a sue- 



208 ROME 

cessor with the same authority as that of 
Augustus. To this, however, we must add 
(and it well shows the real change that had 
been effected by the long revolution) that 
no choice of Senate and people could hold 
good unless the consent of the army could 
be had. 

Of course, Augustus had considered all this, 
and had made his own plans. He would 
choose a member of his own family, one, that 
is, who inherited the name and fame of Caesar 
by blood or adoption, would adopt him as a 
son (for he had no son of his own), make him 
his heir, associate him as far as possible in his 
own dignity and authority, and thus mark 
him out as the natural heir to the principate. 
This would make it difficult for Senate or 
army to refuse him; beyond that Augustus 
knew that he could not go. He was unlucky 
in losing one after another the youths whom 
he thus destined to succeed him, and even- 
tually had to fall back on his stepson Tibe- 
rius: a great soldier, as we have seen, and a 
man of integrity and ability, but of reserved 
and even morose temper, and one with whom 
the shrewd and genial Augustus had little in 
common. 



REVIVAL OF ROMAN SPIRIT 209 

When Augustus died there was an anxious 
moment. There was no reason why the 
principate should be confined to the family of 
the Caesars, nor any reason but expediency 
for having a princeps at all. But, after all, 
the will of the dead ruler prevailed, and 
Tiberius slipped into his place without opposi- 
tion; the Senate accepted him as plainly 
marked out by Augustus, and the army raised 
no difficulty, though his nephew Germanicus 
Caesar was young, popular, and in actual 
command of the army on the Rhine. Some 
mocking voices were heard, and through- 
out his principate of twenty-three years 
Tiberius had to endure continual annoyance 
from the old republican families, but there 
was no real attempt to quarrel with the 
principate as an institution of the Roman 
State. 

I have dwelt on this point at some length 
in order to show what a singular creation this 
principate of Augustus was. To proclaim 
monarchy outright would probably have been 
fatal; to take the whole work on himself 
would be to leave the old governing families 
idle and discontented; on the other hand, to 
do the necessary work as a yearly elected 



210 ROME 

magistrate, according to the old practice, 
was plainly impossible. Election by the 
people of the Roman city would have little 
force in the eyes of the Empire, and it was this 
Empire as a whole that Augustus wished to 
represent. The course he took shows him 
a shrewd, observant, tactical diplomatist, if 
ever there was one. He is not a man on whose 
character we dwell with sympathy or enthusi- 
asm; he does not kindle our admiration like 
C. Gracchus or Caesar; but he was essentially 
the man for the hour. 

To him we owe in large measure the glories 
of "the Augustan age," with its poets, 
historians, and artists; it was the "Augustan 
peace," and the encouragement and patron- 
age of Augustus, that enable Horace to write 
his perfect lyrics and his good-natured com- 
ments on human life, Ovid to pour forth his 
abundant stream of beautiful versification, 
Tibullus and Propertius to sing of the Italian 
country and its deities and festivals, and Livy, 
the greatest of Roman historians, to do in 
noble prose what Virgil had done in noble 
verse — to inspire Romans and Italians with 
enthusiasm for the great deeds of their ances- 
tors. But the world owes Augustus a still 



REVIVAL OF ROMAN SPIRIT 211 

greater debt than this; for he laid securely 
the foundations of an imperial system strong 
enough to save for us, through centuries of 
danger, the priceless treasures of Grseco- 
Roman civilisation. 



CHAPTER IX 

LIFE IN THE ROMAN EMPIRE 

Now that we have seen the Empire made 
comparatively secure by Augustus, and set in 
the way of development on what seem to be 
rational principles, let us pause and try to 
gain some idea of the social life going on 
within it: excluding that of the city of Rome, 
which is no longer of the old paramount 
importance. How did the inhabitants of the 
Empire live and occupy themselves during 
the first two centuries of our era? 

The first point to make quite sure of is that 
this life was in the main a life in towns. Ro- 
man policy had always favoured the mainte- 
nance of existing towns, except in the very 
rare cases where they were deemed too 
dangerous. Carthage and Corinth had been 
destroyed by Rome on this pretext, but they 
had been founded afresh by Julius Csesar, 
and were now beginning a long and vigorous 
city life. In the East, where city-states 

212 



LIFE IN THE ROMAN EMPIRE 213 

abounded, Rome retained and adorned them, 
or built new ones, as Pompey did after crush- 
ing Mithradates and Tigranes. In the West, 
in Gaul and Spain, where they did not exist 
at all, she founded some, and by a wonder- 
fully wise policy favoured the natural growth 
of others. The people of these western 
provinces lived chiefly in some kind of vil- 
lages, scattered over a district which we may 
call a canton, often, perhaps, as big as an 
English county of to-day. The Roman policy 
was either to found a city to serve as the 
centre of the canton, and to endow it with 
magistrates and senate on the Roman model : 
or to give the canton its senate and magis- 
trates, and leave it to develop its own 
town-centre. 

This policy shows extremely well the genius 
of Rome for civilising, or Romanising, with- 
out destroying the grouping and the habits 
of the people to be civilised, or Romanised. 
The old tribal (or cantonal) system remained, 
and its officers were the chiefs of the old popu- 
lation; but they now bore Roman names, 
duoviriy qucestores, and so on, and sat in an 
assembly called ordo — i. e. senate. If a town 
were not founded at once, in which the busi- 



214 ROME 

ness of the canton could be carried on, it was 
certain to grow of itself. A purely rural 
region, where the people live in villages only, 
was contrary to Roman interests and tradi- 
tions; it was inconvenient for raising taxes, 
and it did not give those opportunities of 
culture and amusement which the Roman 
looked for when he travelled or settled in a 
province. The provincials, too, were in this 
way made more happy and contented; town 
life greatly helped in civilising them, attract- 
ing the better or richer people from the 
villages. 

To help us in realising this urban character 
of Roman provincial life, we may compare it 
with that of our fellow-subjects in India at the 
present day. India is in the main a rural 
country, and by far the great majority of its 
inhabitants live on the land and support them- 
selves by agriculture. Only about 30,000,000 
live in towns, as against 235,000,000 in the 
rural districts, and the few great cities are 
rather industrial and commercial centres 
than homes of culture and amusement. The 
economic unit of India is the village, and this 
simple fact is enough to explain why India 
never has been Anglicised. Instinctively the 



LIFE IN THE ROMAN EMPIRE 215 

Romans perceived that if a province were to be 
Romanised, the process could not be set going 
in villages; and where there were only vil- 
lages, they gave the districts the opportunity 
of developing towns in their midst. The 
opportunity, we may reasonably suppose, was 
rarely missed, for at all times in their history 
the Romans had a wonderful power of making 
their subjects eager to imitate their own 
institutions. Thus Spain, Gaul, and even 
Britain, became rich in towns after the Roman 
model — towns which served to humanise the 
people, while making them obedient subjects. 
Let us now see, with the help of a few 
striking examples, how, by the second cen- 
tury of our era, the Empire was covered with 
towns. For Italy and Greece we do not need 
illustrations — we are already well aware of 
the fact. But even far away in the East, in 
regions where the Greeks had never settled, 
if the Romans came to stay they left cities 
behind them. Look, for example, at a map of 
Syria or Palestine, and note the great cara- 
van route leading from Damascus southwards 
on the east side of the Jordan, a road impor- 
tant to Rome because it carried the merchan- 
dise of the Far East to Damascus and the 



216 ROME 

Mediterranean by way of the Persian Gulf 
and Petra. Before the traveller of to-day 
has gone far south from Damascus he will 
come on the splendid ruins of two successive 
cities built by the Romans in this period, 
Gerasa and Philadelphia, where the sheep 
now graze among the ruins of temples, 
theatres, and baths. A famous English 
traveller l wrote of them long ago that they 
enabled him to form some conception of the 
grandeur and might of the Roman Empire: 
"That cities so far removed from the capital, 
and built almost in the desert, should have 
been adorned with so many splendid monu- 
ments, afforded one of the most striking 
proofs of the marvellous energy and splendid 
enterprise of that great people who had sub- 
jected the world/ 5 

The mention of Damascus may remind us 
of a traveller of the first century a.d. whose 
journeys are fortunately recorded and ad- 
mirably illustrate the fact that in Asia Minor 
and Greece the life of the people was centred 
in the great cities. St. Paul went from city 
to city, choosing by preference for his mission- 
ary work the most populous ones, such as 

1 Sir A. H. Layard. 



LIFE IN THE ROMAN EMPIRE 217 

Antioch, Ephesus, Thessalonica, Corinth and 
Athens. 

Passing westwards, and leaving out of ac- 
count the many cities of Egypt, we shall 
find that what has been so far said holds good 
of the Roman province of Africa. This 
province eventually became one of the most 
highly cultured as well as populous, mainly 
owing to its numerous towns. Of many of 
these the remains still astonish the traveller. 
A photograph lies before me of one of them 
which still stands almost in the desert, silent 
and abandoned, with temples, streets, and all 
the belongings of a great city as perfect as 
at the excavated Pompeii, which was over- 
whelmed in this period by the great eruption 
of Vesuvius. An inscription tells us that 
Thamugadi was founded in the year a.d. 100, 
and built with the help of a legion of Roman 
soldiers to guard civilisation against the 
marauders of the desert. Another of these 
towns is a good example of the way in which 
the army contributed to the policy of creating 
town-centres; Lambaesis, now called Djebel- 
Aures, was the permanent station of a mili- 
tary force, round which there grew up a civil 
population of traders and camp-followers. 



218 ROME 

Great roads, here as everywhere in the Em- 
pire, connected these towns with each other 
and with the capital of the province, in this 
case Carthage. 

If we cross the sea from Africa to Gaul or 
Spain we shall find the same process going on. 
Spain we must pass by; but in Gaul we land 
at the ancient Greek city of Massilia, which, 
as Marseilles, is still the great port of south- 
ern France. A little to the north, Nismes 
(Nemausus) was formed into a city by Augus- 
tus out of a rural population; its vast Roman 
amphitheatre and an exquisitely beautiful 
temple belong to the second century, and still 
stand in the middle of the modern city. 
Lyons was also founded by Augustus, as we 
saw in the last chapter, with a special pur- 
pose. Farther north the cities on the great 
roads were gradually formed, out of tribal 
populations living in villages, and many of 
them still bear the names of those tribes: 
Paris is the town-centre of the Parisii, 
Rheims of the Remisii, Soissons of the 
Suessiones, Trier of the Treveri. This 
last city, on the Moselle, now a German 
one, can boast of more imposing Roman 
work than any north of Italy, and is within 



LIFE IN THE ROMAN EMPIRE 219 

comparatively easy reach of visitors from 
our shores. 

Britain, which was invaded and made a 
province in the reign of Claudius, was never 
so fully Romanised as other provinces, partly 
owing to the wild and stubborn nature of its 
inhabitants; but even in our midst the Roman 
has left obvious traces of his belief in town 
life. London was a trading centre before the 
coming of the Romans, and they maintained 
it as such; but nearly all their other towns 
had a more directly military origin and object. 
The oldest of them is Colchester, a military 
colony, which still has its Roman walls. Then 
came St. Albans (Verulamium), Gloucester, 
Chester, Lincoln and York, strategical points 
of importance, where populous cities still 
stand. In a few cases towns have disap- 
peared, and have only been recovered by 
excavation, e. g. Calleva (Silchester, near 
Basingstoke), the town-centre of the Atre- 
bates; but many of our country towns, 
besides those just mentioned, still stand on 
ancient Roman sites, and even without much 
excavation have yielded traces of their 
Roman inhabitants. One, and one only, 
Dorchester, still boasts of a complete little 



220 ROME 

amphitheatre, which stands just outside the 
town between the Great Western and South 
Western railways, and has been used by Mr. 
Thomas Hardy for a scene in one of his 
novels. All our towns and villages of which 
the names contain the word Chester or cester 
are Roman in origin, though they may not 
have been large cities like Gloucester (Gle- 
vum) ; for Chester is only our English form of 
castra, the Latin for a military encampment. 
If it is now quite clear that the town is the 
unit of civilisation in the Empire, what was 
the social and political life of the town? Of 
this we know now much more than we used to 
do, for it is mirrored in the many thousands 
of inscriptions from every Roman province, 
which have now at last been collected and 
correctly published under the direction of 
the famous Theodor Mommsen, whose name 
cannot be omitted entirely, even in such an 
unpretending book about Rome as this. In 
records on stone there is, indeed, something 
lacking that can only be supplied by litera- 
ture, which reports more elaborately and 
earnestly the thoughts and feelings of men; 
and in the Empire, apart from Italy and 
Rome, there is but little literature to help 



LIFE IN THE ROMAN EMPIRE 221 

us out. But the inscriptions supply us with 
the necessary facts. 

First, of the political condition of these 
innumerable towns we may say that it shows 
diversity in unity. There were several grades 
of privilege among them. Some were nomi- 
nally independent of the Roman government, 
and in alliance with it, but these were few; 
Athens is the most famous example. Others 
were communities of Roman citizens; and 
many had the Latin right, i. e. inferior 
privilege. Lastly, there were great numbers 
of cities — a majority of the whole number — 
whose inhabitants were not Roman citizens 
at "all, but directly under the control of the 
governor of their province, who was limited 
in his authority over the more privileged and 
independent towns. So much for diversity. 

But all the cities were in reality governed 
and organised in much the same way. In 
each there was a constitution closely resem- 
bling that of Rome, and in most instances 
modelled directly upon it. As at Rome, they 
had yearly elected magistrates, who, after 
holding office, passed into a senate of advisers 
and councillors; and these magistrates were 
elected by the populus, or the whole body of 



222 ROME 

citizens. Here was plenty of useful work to 
do, as we can guess from our own experience 
of local self-government. Plutarch, writing in 
this period of his own little town of Chseronea 
in Greece, realises this to the full, and urges 
that the work of the magistrate is honourable 
work, and the more so as it is combined with 
the sense of citizenship in a great empire. 

There was, however, a tendency in these 
provincial towns, as in the city of Rome 
itself, for the magistrate, who must be a man 
of substance, to undertake the expense of 
amusing the people; a tendency to make the 
people dependent on the rich for their com- 
forts rather than on their own industry and 
exertion. The magistrate, besides paying a 
large fee on his accession to office, was ex- 
pected to give public games, to feast the 
people, or to give them a present of money 
all round. And he would wish, too, to dis- 
tinguish his magistracy by erecting some 
public buildings — a bath, aqueduct, or 
theatre; or to endow a school. So it came 
to pass in course of time that his burdens 
were heavier than he could bear, and that 
the whole class to which he belonged, the 
senatorial one, was involved in the same 



LIFE IN THE ROMAN EMPIRE 223 

difficulties. This class could not be re- 
cruited from the common people, who rarely 
had the means, or, indeed, the energy, to rise 
to affluence; and the tendency as time went 
on was to draw the line ever more sharply 
between the dignity of the various classes. 
But the ruin of the senatorial class, or curiales, 
lies outside our limits. 

The lower class was engaged in industry, 
either on the land, or in the town itself. This 
industry was not to any large extent em- 
ployed by capital, nor was it in competition 
with slave-labour, of which in provincial 
towns we do not hear much. The members 
of the various trades and callings worked on 
their own account, but were almost invariably 
grouped together in gilds or associations, and 
these are one of the most interesting features 
in the life of this period. Each of these gilds 
was licensed, or should have been licensed, 
by the central government at Rome — a good 
example of the way in which the long arm of 
that government reached to every provincial 
town through the agency of the provincial 
governor and his officials. Illegal associa- 
tion was a serious crime, and this was one 
of the reasons why the small Christian com- 



224 ROME 

munities were looked on with suspicion by the 
government. 

What was the object of these associations ? 
The question has often been asked whether 
they were in any sense provident societies like 
our friendly societies, and, on the whole, the 
conclusion of investigators has been that they 
were not. If we had more literature dealing 
with provincial life, or such a correspondence 
as that of Cicero and his friends, we could give 
a more certain answer. 

But in one sense at least they may be called 
provident societies. All, or nearly all, of 
them had as one main object the assurance of 
a proper tomb and decent funeral for the 
members. This object can only be fully ap- 
preciated after some real study of the social 
life and religion of that and the preceding age, 
but when it is understood it is inexpressibly 
touching. It would seem that the life of the 
working man of that day was by no means 
an unhappy one, that he was not driven or 
enslaved by an employer, nor forced to live 
in grimy and unwholesome surroundings. So 
far as we can tell he had little anxiety in this 
life, and worshipped his gods, and performed 
his vows to them, with genuine gratitude. 



LIFE IN THE ROMAN EMPIRE 225 

But that he should be utterly neglected and 
forgotten after death, thrown into some 
common grave to moulder away unnoticed, 
"where no hand would bring the annual 
offering of wine and flowers" — this seems to 
have been the shadow ever hanging over his 
life. We may doubt whether the hope of 
immortality had, as a rule, anything to do 
with this anxiety. It was rather an inherited 
instinct than a faith or creed that moved these 
poor people. Originally it had been the de- 
sire not to have to wander as a ghost for want 
of due burial; now it is rather the fear that 
they might be forgotten by those left behind, 
or, indeed, by future generations. 

The instinct of association is common to 
man, and in a vast empire, where the tendency 
was, and long had been, to obliterate the old 
social grouping of kinship, real or supposed, it 
would be some consolation to belong to a club 
of friends with common interests, accus- 
tomed to share the joys and perils of life, and 
bent on decent burial when death should 
overtake them. Even in this life they would 
meet from time to time to eat, drink and 
enjoy themselves. 

On the whole, we may conclude that this 



226 ROME 

life of the towns was a happy one, so long as 
the frontiers were well guarded and no sudden 
raid or invasion by an enemy was likely; so 
long, too, as person and property were 
securely protected under Roman law ad- 
ministered without corruption, and amuse- 
ments and conveniences were to be had for 
little or nothing. But undoubtedly some- 
thing was wanting; there was mischief in the 
social system somewhere, though it was not 
easy to lay finger upon it. The sap was run- 
ning in the plant too feebly; there was a lack 
of keen industrial energy and of the instinct 
of self-help. As time went on, the central 
government grew too paternal, interfered too 
much in the life of these towns, and so en- 
couraged the tendency to "slackness." And 
more and more, as pressure came on the 
Empire from without, the play of life in 
these once happy cities became an automatic 
movement of machinery, the central wheel 
of which was the Csesar at Rome. 

Another aspect of the life of the provincial 
towns must be mentioned here, which sug- 
gests that the trend of the time was not 
entirely healthy. I said at the beginning of 
this book that the great monuments left be- 



CHAPTER X 

THE EMPIRE UNDER THE ANTONINES — 
CONCLUSION 

The chief work of Rome in the world, as 
has often been said in this little book, was the 
defence of Mediterranean civilisation against 
external enemies. That work was of a double 
nature. It could not be done simply by 
marking out and holding lines of frontier; it 
was also necessary so to organise the Empire 
within its frontiers that the whole should 
contribute to the common object, with men, 
money and public spirit. The last two 
chapters will have shown that from the time 
of Julius and Augustus Roman rulers fully 
recognised this twofold nature of their task. 
Augustus in particular, while gradually set- 
tling the frontiers on a system well thought 
out, arid adapted to his means and experience, 
also spent much time and pains on internal 
organisation. He found the Empire a loose 
collection of subject territories, each gov- 

229 



230 ROME 

erned, well or ill as it might happen, by an 
officer almost independent of the central 
authority; he left it, at the end of his long 
life, in the way of becoming a well-compacted 
whole, in which every part felt more or less 
the force of a just central government; a 
civilised State "standing out in clear relief 
against the surrounding barbarism." 

In such an empire there must, of course, be 
differences of race and language — differences, 
too, of habits, feelings, modes of thought; but 
under just and wise rule such differences need 
be no hindrance to the political unity of the 
whole. There is a book of this period, within 
the reach of every one, which illustrates better 
than any other this unity in diversity of the 
Roman Empire — I mean the Acts of the 
Apostles. It should be studied carefully, 
with maps and such other helps as may be 
available, down to the last chapter, where it 
leaves St. Paul at Rome, living in his own 
hired house, in the centre of Mediterranean 
life and government. 

Under the immediate successors of Augus- 
tus, Tiberius, Claudius and Nero, his policy 
was, on the whole, maintained with good faith 
and discretion: and at the close of the first 



EMPIRE UNDER ANTONINES 231 

century a.d. Vespasian and his two sons, 
Titus and Domitian, did little more than 
improve the working of the machinery of his 
government. More and more, it is true, the 
constitution became a real monarchy; the 
part played in it by the Senate of the free 
State was getting steadily narrowed; but this 
was all in the interest of efficiency, and, so far 
as we can see, it was necessary to the internal 
development of the Empire. The Caesars of 
the first century must have the credit of rul- 
ing wisely, with the help of their advisers, 
on the Augustan principles. True, the great 
literary genius of the age, the historian Taci- 
tus, by drawing brilliant and lurid portraits 
of some of them, has diverted our attention 
from their work as agents of a great system; 
but to tell their story as Tacitus has told it 
is neither possible nor necessary here. I may 
pass them over and go on to the second cen- 
tury and the age of the Antonines, which has 
rightly been judged by historians to be the 
most brilliant and the happiest in all Roman 
history. 

That four men of what seems to us "right 
judgment in all things" should succeed each 
other in power at this critical time, is one 



232 ROME 

more example of the wonderful good fortune 
of Rome. All were men of capacity and edu- 
cation, hard workers and conscientious, and 
they seem to have communicated their good 
qualities to their subordinates, for they never 
wanted for loyal helpers. The Senate, in- 
deed, was now of little avail for actual work, 
and the greater part of the business had long 
been done by Caesar 1 and his own "servants," 
freedmen for the most part, often ambitious 
and unscrupulous Greeks; but in this period, 
as we shall see directly, the civil service, as 
we may call it, was placed on a sound and 
honourable basis. It would seem as if the 
ideas of duty and discipline were once more 
to prevail throughout the Roman official 
world. 

The first of the four rulers, Ulpius Trajanus, 
known to us all as Trajan, was not of Roman 
or even Italian birth, but came from the prov- 
ince of further Spain: a fact which marks 
the growth of the idea that every part of the 
Empire may now be turned to account for the 
common good. Trajan was a soldier by 

1 This is the title by which the princeps was usually known 
in the Empire; see e. g. Matt. xxii. 17 foil., or Acts xxv. 
10 foil. 



EMPIRE UNDER ANTONINES 233 

breeding and disposition, and his contribu- 
tion to the work of this period was mainly a 
military one. The frontier along the Danube, 
the last (as we have seen) to be settled, had 
always been the weakest; and yet here hence- 
forward was to be the most dangerous point 
in the Empire's line of defence. Along the 
whole length of the lower Danube a great 
mass of barbarian tribes was already pressing, 
pressed themselves from behind by others to 
north and east. And here, to the north of the 
river, a great kingdom had been founded by 
a king of the Dacian people, which corre- 
sponds roughly with the modern Roumania. 
A glance at a map of the Empire will show 
that such a kingdom would be a standing 
menace to Italy, to Greece, and even to the 
peninsula of Asia Minor, and from the Roman 
point of view Trajan was quite justified in his 
determination to conquer and annex it. He 
carried out this policy in two successive wars, 
with consummate daring and skill. Dacia 
became a Roman province, and lasted as such 
long enough (about 200 years) to be an effect- 
ual help to imperial defence in this quarter. 
The story of the two wars is told in the 
marvellous series of sculptures forming a 



234 ROME 

spiral round the column of Trajan, which 
stood and still stands at Rome in the forum 
built by him and called by his name. 

Towards the end of his life Trajan em- 
barked on a new policy in the East, and failed 
to carry it out. The shrewd Augustus, as we 
saw, had trusted here to his prestige, knowing 
that war in this region was both perilous and 
expensive. Since then both peril and expense 
had been incurred here under Nero, and no 
definite results had been gained. Trajan, 
however, provoked by a move of the Parthian 
king, made up his mind to seize Armenia, the 
old bone of contention between Rome and 
Parthia, and not only did this, but added by 
conquest two other provinces, Mesopotamia 
and Assyria. Some historians have thought 
his judgment as good here as it was on the 
Danube. The best way of deciding the ques- 
tion is to look carefully at a map of the Empire 
and then to ask oneself whether these ter- 
ritories were really needed for the protection 
of Mediterranean civilisation. For myself I 
unhesitatingly answer in the negative; but 
there is no need to dispute the point here, as 
Trajan died before he had made his conquests 
secure. The Jews dispersed all over these 



EMPIRE UNDER ANTONINES 235 

regions, urged by their implacable hatred of 
Rome, stirred up rebellion in Trajan's rear 
with alarming ferocity, and in the middle of 
this turmoil he died on his way back to Rome. 
His successor Hadrian at once renounced any 
attempt to keep the new provinces. 

It would be unjust to the memory of a great 
man if we were to think of Trajan as a soldier 
only. He was a strenuous man, unsparing 
of himself in any part of his duty. He pur- 
sued a policy of public benefit in Italy, 
striving, like Augustus, to encourage agricul- 
ture and population, and carrying out a plan 
of his predecessor Nerva for providing a fund 
for the education of poor children. This last 
institution became an important one, and 
shows well how really benevolent — perhaps 
even to excess — how anxious for the well- 
being of Italy, were the Caesars of the second 
century. Money was lent by the State to 
the Italian farmers in need of it, and the 
interest, at five per cent., was appropriated to 
the education of boys up to eighteen and girls 
up to fourteen years of age. 

Trajan bestowed the same minute care on 
the provinces. In most of these there was 
no trouble, but in one case, Bithynia, which 



236 ROME 

had been under Senatorial governors, he had 
to send out a special commissioner to repair 
neglect and mischief. Luckily for us it 
happened that this commissioner was Pliny 
the younger, nephew of the great encyclo- 
paedist of the same name; and Pliny was so 
prominent a figure of the time that his corre- 
spondence has been preserved. That part of 
it which contains his letters to Trajan, and 
Trajan's brief and pithy answers, is one of the 
most precious treasures that have survived 
from ancient literature. Pliny consults him 
on a variety of details, some of them almost 
ludicrously petty, some of them of general 
importance, such as a famous one about his 
policy towards the Christians; and the an- 
swers show us Trajan as a shrewd and sensi- 
ble man, fully aware that in such a unity 
as the Roman Empire there must needs be 
diversity, and that governors must learn to 
adapt themselves to such diversity without 
losing hold of the principles of justice and 
equity. Before we leave this subject it may 
be as well to mention that this constant 
interchange of letters between persons more 
than a thousand miles apart need astonish 
no one. In the interest of imperialism the 



EMPIRE UNDER ANTONINES 237 

public posts had been thoroughly organised 
by Augustus; the roads were excellent, the 
shipping well seen to, and travelling was at 
least as easy and rapid as it was in England 
less than a century ago. 

Trajan's strong and rather rugged features, 
familiar to all students of the Empire, are in 
striking contrast to those of his three suc- 
cessors. He was clean shaven, but his next 
successor, Hadrian, introduced the practice of 
wearing his beard, and this was adhered to. 
All the imperial portraits of this age, as pre- 
served on coins and sculptures, are perfectly 
authentic, and the likenesses are consistent. 
In the British Museum the reader may see the 
features of these great Csesars as faithfully 
reproduced as those of British statesmen in 
the National Portrait Gallery. 

Trajan was succeeded by his cousin Ha- 
drian, beyond doubt one of the most capable 
and efficient men who ever wielded great 
power. No one can study his reign without 
feeling that it was better in this age, if an 
efficient man could be found, that his hand 
alone should be on the helm. Probably 
Hadrian was only one of many who might 
have done as well as he did, for there was now 



238 ROME 

a spirit abroad of intelligent industry directed 
to the good of the State; yet it is almost 
certain that the Empire was the better for 
not having the sovereignty put into com- 
mission. It has been well said of Hadrian 
that he desired "to see himself all that was to 
be seen, to know all that was to be known, 
to do all that was to be done"; and subse- 
quent events proved that this intelligent 
industry could hardly have been carried all 
through the imperial work with equal effect, 
had it been shared with others. 

Hadrian accomplished his work by two 
long periods of travel, each lasting some four 
years. Without any pomp or state he made 
himself acquainted with all parts of the Em- 
pire and their needs, as no ruler had done 
since Augustus and Agrippa shared such a 
task between them. The more immediate 
object was to inspect the frontiers and secure 
them, and as Hadrian was a trained soldier, 
with much experience under Trajan, this was 
to him familiar work. But he was so full 
of curiosity, so anxious to see all that the 
Empire had to show him, that while he 
practised his indefatigable industry he could 
also gratify his intelligence. In this he was 



EMPIRE UNDER ANTONINES 239 

more like Julius Csesar than any other Roman 
we know of, though in most traits of char- 
acter he was very different from that great 
man. It is not possible here to describe 
Hadrian's frontier work in detail, but a 
specimen of it shall be given which should be 
interesting to British readers. 

Britain had been invaded by Claudius in 
the previous century, and the southern part 
of the island had been made into a Roman 
province. Since then the frontier had been 
pushed farther north, and the frontier strong- 
holds were no longer Colchester and Glouces- 
ter, but Lincoln, Chester and York. Hadrian 
spent several months here in the course of his 
first journey, and his visit had a remarkable 
result which we can see with our eyes at this 
moment. He must have noted two facts: 
first, the unsettled and rebellious condition 
of the natives of ^Yorkshire and Northumber- 
land (Brigantes): and secondly, the narrow 
waist of the island between the Solway Firth 
and the mouth of the Tyne. He must have 
reasoned that if Roman forces could be per- 
manently established on a fortified line be- 
tween the two seas, this line would serve as 
a check on the Brigantes, and also as a base 



240 ROME 

of operations for further advance north- 
wards. 

Thus it is that "Hadrian's wall" remains 
as the most striking of all Roman works in 
our island. It is about seventy miles long, 
and consisted eventually (for we cannot be 
sure that it was completed by Hadrian) of a 
stone wall on the northern side, twenty feet 
high, an earthen rampart on the southern 
side, and a military road between them. At 
intervals there were fortified stations, seven- 
teen in all, including the two which connected 
the lines with the sea; of these two the east- 
ern one, near Newcastle, now famous for its 
collieries, is still known as Wallsend. The 
wall enabled the Romans to advance north- 
wards, and soon another fortification was 
built on a smaller scale between the Forth and 
Clyde, about which a large volume has just 
been published by Dr. G. Macdonald, of 
Edinburgh. The conquest of the Highlands 
was never, indeed, carried out; but Hadrian's 
great work had an immense moral effect on 
the population to the south of it, and Brit- 
ain became very substantially Romanised. 
Towns and country houses {yillce) sprang up 
in abundance along or near the military 



EMPIRE UNDER ANTONINES 241 

roads. As I write these lines in North Ox- 
fordshire, I have the remains of several of 
these villce within easy reach, and can visit, 
each in a day, at least four considerable 
Roman towns, viz. Cirencester, Gloucester, 
Silchester (Calleva), and last, but not least, 
Bath (Aquae Sulis), where the Romans found 
and used, as they always did in such spots, 
the magnificent hot springs, building noble 
baths about them which may be seen to this 
day. 

Hadrian's care for the good working of the 
civil government was as great as his zeal for 
frontier defence. Two forward steps were 
taken by him in this department, both of 
which helped on that consolidation of the 
Empire which was his constant aim. 

First, he organised and dignified the Civil 
Service, on which the actual good working 
of the whole system depended. Caesar's 
share in this work had steadily been increasing 
while that of the Senate diminished; yet 
Caesar had so far done his part, as we saw just 
now, with the help only of his own personal 
"servants," who were mostly freedmen, i. e. 
slaves by origin, and many of them Greeks. 
Hadrian now established a public imperial 



242 ROME 

civil service, of which the members must be 
Roman knights, i. e. men of a certain conse- 
quence in regard to birth and property. 
These new civil servants were excused all 
military service, and could thus be trained to 
the work without interruption, during their 
earlier vears. 

Secondly, we may date from Hadrian's 
reign the beginning of the consolidation of 
Roman law, and the rise of a school of great 
lawyers such as the world has never known 
since. Apart from the defence of Mediterra- 
nean civilisation, to which, indeed, its indirect 
contribution was not small, this was the most 
valuable legacy of Rome to modern Europe. 
Law had originallv consisted mainlv of the old 
legal rules of the city-state of Rome, embodied 
in the Twelve tables, and a few statutes; 
but, in course of time, through the need of 
interpreting these, and adjusting them to the 
customs of other peoples in the Empire, an 
immense body of what we may call judge- 
made laic had arisen in the form of edicts or 
public notices of magistrates, issued both in 
Italy and the provinces. As these customs 
were now well known, and as the Empire had 
reached its limits, it was possible to close 



EMPIRE UNDER ANTONINES 243 

and consolidate this huge body of official 
decisions and precedents; and this was done 
under Hadrian's direction. The other two 
sources of law were still to grow largely before 
they could be welded into the great "Body 
of Law" {Corpus Juris) compiled under the 
orders of Justinian in the sixth century, 
which is still the chief European textbook of 
legal studies. These two sources were the 
delivered opinions of wise lawyers on points of 
law, and the decisions of the Csesars in various 
forms, all of which had the force of law. 

The death of Hadrian in a.d. 138 brings us 
to the third of the great Caesars of this age, 
Titus Antoninus, a man who, at fifty-two, had 
already done excellent work for the Empire. 
He is known to history as Antoninus Pius, 
and this last name, given him apparently on 
his accession, may be a reminiscence of Vir- 
gil's epithet for his hero, and may be due to 
the strong sense of duty which marked his 
whole life, public and private. He seems, 
indeed, vividly to recall the ideal of the 
Roman character as we traced it in the third 
chapter of this book; yet he was not Italian 
by birth. His family belonged to Nismes in 
southern Gaul, and that ancient city still 



244 ROME 

honours him with a "Place Antonin," in 
which his statue stands. His features, as 
they appear on portrait busts, entirely con- 
firm the account of him left us by his nephew 
and successor. Grave and wise, gentle yet 
firm, religious in the true old Roman sense, 
pure in life, and simple in all his needs and 
pleasures, he ruled over a peaceful and con- 
tented empire, devoting himself to the work 
of humanising and softening the life and lot 
of his subjects. 

Let us glance, for example, at his attitude 
towards slavery, which, when we last noticed 
it, was threatening to become a deadly poi- 
son in the Roman system. During the first 
century of the Empire, chiefly under the influ- 
ence of the Stoic philosophy, as later on under 
that of Christianity, there had been growing 
up a feeling that a slave was, after all, a hu- 
man being, and had some claim to be treated 
as such under the Roman law, beneficent 
in its dealings with all other human beings. 
Antoninus followed out this new idea both in 
legislation and in his private life, as did his 
successor also, who adored his memory. They 
limited the right of a master over his slaves 
in several ways; ordaining that if cruelty were 



EMPIRE UNDER ANTONINES 245 

proved against a master, he should be com- 
pelled to sell the slave he had ill-treated. It 
is noteworthy, too, that the philosopher in 
whom they most delighted, Epictetus, had 
himself originally been a slave. There is no 
better way of realising the spirit of humanity 
which actuated Antoninus and his successor 
than by making some acquaintance with the 
moral philosophy of Epictetus, and the Medi- 
tations of Marcus Aurelius. The Golden Say- 
ings of Epictetus, in the Golden Treasury 
Series, 1 and Dr. Kendall's translation of the 
Meditations, will be of use to those who do 
not read Greek. 

Hadrian had left the Empire well guarded, 
and it does not seem to have occurred to 
Antoninus to see for himself that Hadrian's 
vigilance was maintained. This was the one 
weak point of his reign, and it cost his suc- 
cessors dear. He only once left Italy, and his 
mind was never occupied with wars or ru- 
mours or wars; he lived tranquilly, and died 
peacefully, without trouble or anxiety. But 
we know that even before his death clouds 
were beginning to gather on the northern 
frontier; and we cannot but feel that the 

1 By Hastings Crossley: Macmillan & Co. 



246 ROME 

beautiful tranquillity of Antoninus's life 
was hardly compatible with the duty of an 
imperial guardian. 

Marcus Aurelius, the author of the Medita- 
tions, succeeded his uncle and adoptive father 
in a.d. 161. Though not the greatest of the 
four as a ruler, he was the most remarkable 
as a man, and holds a higher place than the 
others in the world's esteem. We may find 
parallels in history to Trajan, less easily, per- 
haps, to Hadrian and Antoninus; but there 
is no monarch like Marcus, not even in the 
history of the Jews. It is, indeed, astonishing 
that Rome, Rome of the hard practical 
temperament, should have produced a ruler 
who was a philosopher and almost a saint, and 
yet capable of government. It is the last 
striking manifestation of the old Roman 
spirit of duty and discipline, now kindled into 
a real ethical emotion by the teaching of the 
Stoics, far the most inspiring creed then avail- 
able for a man of action. Without any aid 
from Christianity, which, indeed, he could 
not understand and occasionally persecuted, 
Marcus learnt not only how to make his own 
life pure, but how to live and work for the 
world of his day. 



EMPIRE UNDER ANTONINES 247 

But saintliness on the throne, as in the case 
of St. Louis of France, has its drawbacks in 
practical work. It is, perhaps, true that the 
mind of Marcus was more active, and found 
greater satisfaction, in questioning itself than 
in anxious inquiry into the state of the Empire. 
He was not one of those of whom our poet 
says that they do Duty's work and know it 
not; and as a consequence his days were not 
serene and bright. He had a tendency to be 
morbid, and, like all morbid men, he was 
serious even to sadness. It has been well 
said of him that he is always insisting on his 
faith in a universe in which, nevertheless, he 
can find nothing but disappointment. 

His sensitiveness about his duty sometimes 
warped his judgment and blunted his discern- 
ment of character. At the outset he made a 
bad blunder in dividing the imperial power 
with his brother by adoption, Lucius Verus, 
who had little principle and much leaning 
to pleasure. To him he committed the charge 
of a war with Parthia which became inevit- 
able, and though the Roman arms were 
successful, this was not due to the skill or 
energy of either Marcus or Verus. Had a 
strong scientific mind been in command, it 



248 ROME 

might have been possible to avert or mitigate 
a calamity which now fell on the Mediter- 
ranean world, and had a share, perhaps a 
large one, in the decay and fall of the Empire. 
The legions brought back with them from the 
East one of the most terrible plagues known 
to history, which can only be compared for 
its effects with the Black Death in the four- 
teenth century. 

Not only in the East, but nearer home, 
Marcus had to meet formidable foes who 
broke through the frontiers with which Ha- 
drian had taken such pains. Pushed forward 
by pressure from the rear, German tribes 
unwillingly made their way into Roman 
territory, overran the new province of 
Dacia, crossed the Danube, and even passed 
over the Alps into Italy. Marcus's difficul- 
ties were great, but he met them with patience 
and courage. The pestilence had so greatly 
thinned the population that both men and 
money were wanting for the war, and the 
struggle to drive back the unwilling invaders 
was prolonged for thirteen years. It was 
still going on when Marcus died of fever in 
camp at Vienna. As he closed his eyes in 
his tent he must have felt that he had spent 



EMPIRE UNDER ANTONINES 249 

himself in vain, and that evil days were in 
store for the Empire. He left a worthless 
son, Commodus, who failed to understand 
the danger, and let things go. 

We need not follow the Empire in its down- 
ward course. We have seen what the work 
of Rome in the world was to be, and how at 
last she accomplished it in spite of constant 
peril and frequent disaster. From Marcus 
Aurelius onwards the strain of self-defence 
was too great to allow of progress in any social 
or political sense. The monarchy became 
more absolute, the machinery of government 
more complicated; the masses were over- 
taxed, and the middle classes ruined. Depop- 
ulation again set in, and attempts to remedy 
it by settling barbarian invaders within the 
frontiers had some bad results. In less than 
a century from the death of Marcus the 
Empire had been divided into two halves of 
east and west, with a new capital for the 
eastern half at Byzantium (Constantinople). 
This, like all the changes of the later Empire, 
was meant strictly for the purpose of resisting 
the invaders; but, none the less, they broke 
at last through all barriers. 



250 ROME 

Yet this did not happen before the name 
and fame of Rome had made such deep 
impression on their minds that they sought 
to deserve the inheritance which had thus 
fallen to them; despising, indeed, the degen- 
erate provincials who struck no blow in their 
own defence, but full of respect for the majes- 
tic power which had for so many centuries 
confronted and instructed them. 1 They never 
swept away the civilisation of the Mediter- 
ranean; from Julius onwards the Roman 
rulers had done so much to defend it, had 
raised its prestige so high, had so thoroughly 
organised its internal life, that uncivilised 
peoples neither could nor would destroy it. 

We still enjoy its best fruits — the art, 
science and literature of Hellas, the genius 
of Rome for law — for "the just interference 
of the State in the interests and passions of 
humanity." 2 We may be apt at the present 
day, when science has opened out for us so 
many new paths of knowledge, and inspired 
us with such enthusiasm in pursuing them, 
to forget the value of the inheritance which 
Rome preserved for us. But this is merely a 

1 Bryce, Holy Roman Empire. 

2 This is Mommsen's definition of Law. 



EMPIRE UNDER ANTONINES 251 

passing phase of feeling; it is really quite 
inconsistent with the character of an age 
which recognises the doctrine of evolution as 
its great discovery. It is natural to civilised 
man to go back upon his past, and to be grate- 
ful for all profit he can gain from the study of 
his own development. So we may be certain 
that the claim of Greece and Rome to our 
eternal gratitude will never cease to be as- 
serted, and their right to teach us still what 
we could have learnt nowhere else, will never 
be successfully disputed. 

November, 1911. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 



The following books are suggested as among those most 
likely to be useful to students who wish to pursue the subject 
further — 

I. Large Histories. Mommsen: History of Rome to the Death 
of Ccesar, with an additional volume entitled The Provinces of 
the Roman Empire; the whole, in the English translation, is in 
seven volumes. Heitland: The Roman Republic, in three 
volumes (a recent publication) . Gibbon : The Decline and Fall 
of the Roman Empire, edited by Prof. Bury. 

II. Smaller histories in one volume. Pelham: Outlines of 
Roman History (a masterly work). How and Leigh: A 
History of Rome to the Death of Ccesar. Bubt: The Student's 
Roman Empire. There are many school histories, but these 
are rather fuller and more interesting. 

III. Books on special subjects of Roman Life, etc. Green- 
idge: Roman Public Life, in Macmillan's Handbooks of Art 
and Archaeology. Wabde Fowleb: Social Life at Rome in the 
Age of Cicero. Life of Cicero, by Stbacpan-Davidson, and Life 
of Cmsar, by Wabde Fowleb, both in Putnam's series of 
"Heroes of the Nations." Ccesar 1 s Conquest of Gaul, by T. 
Rice Holmes. Dill: Roman Society from Nero to Marcus 
Aurelius. 

IV. Ancient authorities in translation. Plutarch's Roman 
Lives may be read with advantage in any translation, e. g. that 
of Langhorne. The most valuable lives are those of Cato the 
Elder, iEmilius Paullus, the two Gracchi, Marius and Sulla, 
Pompey and Caesar, Brutus and Antony. There is a transla- 
tion of the whole Correspondence of Cicero with his Friends, by 
E. S. Shuckburgh, published by Bell & Sons. 



253 



INDEX 



Actium, battle of, 187 Dictator, 75 

Agrippa, M. Vipsanius, 201 

Alps, the, 98, 148, 171 Education, 61, 120, 235 

Antoninus Pius, 243 foil. Etruscans, 21 foil., 24 foil. 

Antony, Mark, 187 

Apennines, the, 20 Familia, 57 foil. 

Armenia, 165, 234 Flaminius, C, 99 foil. 

Army, the Roman, 70 foil., 130, FregellaB, 49 

207, 217 Frontiers, 166, 171, 200, 204 

Augustus, 188, 192, 199 foil., foil., 233 foil., 239 

210 

Auspices, 67 Gauls, 35, 86, 96 foil., 99, 168 

foil. 

Brindisi, 49, 175 Gilds under Empire, 223 foil. 

Britain, 170, 219 foil., 239 foU. Gracchus, Gaius, 141 foil. 

Byzantium, 249 Gracchus, Tiberius, 137 foil. 

Csesar, Julius, 11, 168 foil., 173 Hadrian, Emperor, 237 foil. 

foil. Hamilcar Barca, 93 foil. 

Csesar in Shakespeare, 179 Hannibal, 94 foil., 113 

Campania, 20, 41, 102, 104 Hasdrubal, 106 
Cannae, battle of, 102 

Carthage, 38, 86 foil., 212 Imperium, 66 foil., 73 foil., 

Cato the Elder, 12 foil., 15, 18, 128, 207 

61, 63, 120, 126 Inscriptions, 220 
Cato the younger, 173 

Catullus, pOet, 182 Jupiter, 28 foil. 
Caudine Forks, 44 

Censors, 81 foil. Latins, 23, 31, 33 foil., 36, 38 

Census under Empire, 202 foil., 134 

Cicero, M. Tullius, 183 foil. Law, Roman, 31, 78, 158, 242, 

Citizenship, 132 foil., 152, 178 250 

Colonies, 40, 48, 101 Livy, historian, 38, 210 

Commercium, 32, 39 Lucretius, poet, 10, 180 

Consuls, 30, 45, 73 foil. Lucullus, L., 164 

Corfinium, 153 Lugdunum (Lyons), 204 

255 



256 



INDEX 



Marcus Aurelius, 245 foil. 
Marius, 147, 149 foil. 
Massilia, 115 
Messana, 89 
Metaurus, battle of, 107 
Mithradates, 162 foil. 

Nismes, 218, 227, 243 
Nobilitas, 80 

Paterfamilias, 58 foil. 
Patricians and plebeians, 77 
Paul, St., 216, 230 
Pharsalia, battle of, 175 



Senate, 30, 35, 47, 53, 63, 69, 
103, 129, 144, 158, 197 

Sicilian Greeks, 52, 86 

Slavery, 57, 59, 125 foil., 141, 
244 

Spain, 94, 115 

Sulla, L. Cornelius, 147, 155 

Tacitus, historian, 12, 14, 231 
Tarentum, 42, 50, 52 
Tiber, river, 22, 24, 26 
Tiberius, Emperor, 206 
Tigranes of Armenia, 164 foil. 
Trajan, Emperor, 232 foil. 



Philip of Macedon, 101, 113 Trasimene, battle of, 100 



foil. 
Pliny the younger, 236 
Pompeius, Gn., 165 foil. 
Pontifices, 68 
Princeps, 197, 206 
Provinces, 118, 203, 213, 217 

foil. 
Pyrrhus, 50 foil. 

Regulus, 92 
Respublica, 72, 197 

Samnites, 23, 42 foil. 
Scipio Africanus, 108 



Tribunes of the people, 78, 
139 

Umbrians, 23 

Veii, 34 
Via Appia, 49 
Via Flaminia, 48 
Via Latina, 49 

Virgil, 10, 13, 15, 188 foil.; 
198 

Zama, battle of, 109 



MAR 20 1912 



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